Do post-mortems make sense?
No.
Ok, so first off I must say until recently I was an advocate of post-mortems. Of course they make sense, why wouldn't you want to review something that was a success or failure and the experiences that got you there? Then I read Gary Klein's piece on conducting pre-mortems (Klein is the author of Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions).
The argument is the following:
A project post-mortem by definition is to figure out what went wrong (of course there are discussions about what went right as well but 90% of the discussions are usually about the challenges). So the meeting pretty much starts off on a challenging note usually ending in a mix of finger pointing, denial, anger etc. Pretty negative eh! BUT, we all know it is very important to reflect - the question is how can it be done constructively?
Pre-mortem's are all about starting off a new project by identifying what could go wrong (aka risk analysis), raising the red flags and coming up with solutions to preempt those challenges.
So in reality the post-mortem doesn't necessarily go away, it just gets tucked away and repurposed under a different lens. So if you are going to put in the time investment of a "mortem review" make it a pre vs. post. If done correctly, it will save you time down the road and will certainly be worthwhile.
As Holly Green stated in Time for a Pre-Mortem, "In today's business environment, customers, markets, and entire industries can change overnight. If you get it wrong the first time, you might not get another chance."
Makes perfect sense to me. Now the challenge is to get the companies to make the investment in allowing time for pre-mortems.
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