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Rushabh's Pre-Mortem Template

Rushabh's Pre-Mortem Template

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Rushabh's Pre-Mortem Template

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Copy and Run your own Pre-Mortems!

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Context

This pre-mortem template is largely based off Shreyas Doshi’s work on using pre-mortems.

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https://medium.com/@shreyashere/how-to-use-pre-mortems-to-prevent-problems-blunders-and-disasters-6ecc6df6e22a⁠

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What’s a pre-mortem? From HBR:

https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem⁠

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A typical premortem begins after the team has been briefed on the plan.

The leader starts the exercise by informing everyone that the project

has failed spectacularly.

Goal

We failed. What happened?

The goal of this exercise is to look back from the future, and understand why we failed. The exercise can appear to be negative (after all, we’re not going to fail, are we?) but it is a great way to understand your key risks and prepare the team to meet these challenges.

Tigers, Paper Tigers, and Elephants

The terminology used here is from Shreyas’s excellent article on the subject:

How to Use Pre-mortems to Prevent Problems, Blunders, and Disasters⁠

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Tiger 🐯

A threat that will hurt us if we don’t do something about it

paper tiger.png

Paper Tiger 🗞️

An ostensible threat that you are not worried about (but others might be)

Elephant 🐘

The thing that you’re concerned no one is talking about.

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Flow

Setup

Head over to

Setup and Data⁠

section.

Fill in the participants

Create individual sections for each participant using

Participant Ideas⁠

.

Homework or first 15 minutes

Context sharing.

Go to your individual section in the doc.

Think of at least 2 Tigers, and any Paper Tigers or Elephants.

Enter these in.

Quiet time

Moderator will open up the voting table.

Read all the entries.

People can +1 them, with up to 5 votes allowed.

Sharing

Around the room sharing of reflections and what resonated the most.

Top themes and Next steps

Assign owners to emergent top themes.

[offline] Create action plan.

Tigers, Paper Tigers, and Elephants

Homework or first 15 minutes

Top themes and Next steps

Want to print your doc?
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Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

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) instead.