The pre-mortem

To Birmingham today for the second meeting of the Jisc LAMP (library analytics and metrics project) community advisory and planning group. This is a short Jisc-managed project that is working to build a prototype dashboard tool that should allow benchmarking and statistical significance tests on a range of library analytics data.

The LAMP project blog at http://jisclamp.mimas.ac.uk is a good place to start to get up to speed with the work that LAMP is doing and I’m sure that there will be an update on the blog soon to cover some of the things that we discussed during the day.

One of the things that I always find useful about these types of activity, beyond the specific discussions and knowledge sharing about the project and the opportunity to talk to other people working in the sector, is that there is invariably some tool or technique that gets used in the project or programme meetings that you can take away and use more widely. I think I’ve blogged before about the Harvard Elevator pitch from a previous Jisc programme meeting.

This time we were taken through an approach of carrying out a review of the project a couple of years hence, where you had to imagine that the project had failed totally. It hadn’t delivered anything that was useful, so no product, tool or learning came out of the project. It was a complete failure.

We were then asked to try to think about reasons why the project had failed to deliver. So we spent half an hour or so individually writing reasons onto post-it notes. At the end of that time we went round the room reading out the ideas and matching them with similar post-it notes, with Ben and Andy sticking them to a wall and arranging them in groups based on similarity.

It quickly shifted away from going round formally to more of a collective sharing of ideas but that was good and the technique really seemed to be pretty effective at capturing challenges. So we had challenges grouped around technology and data, political and community aspects, and legal aspects for example.

We then spent a bit of time reviewing and recategorising the post-it notes into categories that people were reasonably happy with. Then came the challenge of going through each of the groups of ideas and working out what, if anything, the project could or should do to minimise the risk of that possible outcome happening. That was a really interesting exercise to identify some actions that could be done in the project such as engagement to encourage more take up.

A really interesting demonstration of quite a powerful technique that’s going to be pretty useful for many project settings. It seemed to be a really good way of trying to think about potential hurdles for a project and went beyond what you might normally try to do when thinking about risks, issues and engagement.

It’s interesting to me how so many of the good project management techniques work on the basis of working backwards. Whether that is about writing tasks for a One Page Project Plan based on describing the task as if has been completed, e.g. Site launch completed, or whether it is about working backwards from an end state to plan out the steps and the timescale you will have to go through. These both envisage what a successful project looks like, while the pre-mortem thinks about what might go wrong. Useful technique.