Jargon buster - spring 2016

What is a ‘pre-mortem analysis’ and why should it become part of the project manager’s arsenal? Brian Wernham explains

We all know what a post-mortem is: that horrible period after a disaster where fingers point and scapegoats are identified. But do you know what a pre-mortem is? A pre-mortem is a roleplay exercise where senior project stakeholders imagine the unimaginable: that the project has collapsed due to completely avoidable risks.

Workshopping the unthinkable? 
Start out by holding a risk workshop and getting the participants to imagine that the project in question has failed and consequently made front-page news. 

What do the potential headlines look like? Perhaps ‘Tailbacks as new bridge cannot handle traffic’, or ‘Bridge maintenance costs higher than expected’. Then get the participants to vote on the highest-impact headline. 

The next stage is to start writing supporting details for the hypothetical newspaper story such as, ‘The cheap tolls set by the new bridge company have encouraged a high level of traffic and the number of toll booths cannot handle the demand.’

Countermeasures 
The use of a pre-mortem provides the team with ‘prospective hindsight’ – an encouragement to think the unthinkable that goes beyond classic risk ‘bottom-up’ management. 

Your pre-mortem workshop can consider classic countermeasures: increase the tolls (at least initially), build more toll booths, or perhaps invest in smart-chip technology so that the ‘stop-start’ of classic cash toll collection can be avoided. 

In this way, the risk of ‘group-think’ is circumvented. The team can imagine nightmare, worst-case scenarios, and plan ahead to evade them.

NEC3 and tender documents
Improving tender documents to provide best-in-class service. Tender documents are enquiry documents that suppliers will, hopefully, subsequently turn into a bona fide tender and contract. These tender documents are generally termed ‘deliverables’, but how many are best in class?

Ill-conceived contract amendments are currently the norm. Unnecessarily complicated language is prevalent, and half-completed documents, wrong referencing and references to previous jobs are all too common. How many times do we see ‘TBA’ or ‘to the satisfaction of’ or ‘in the opinion of’ and other such hopeless provisions?

The starting point to improve these deliverables is to get a good, clear brief from the client. This can be difficult, where time constraints or the client’s wish list are unrealistic, so you need to be open and honest: explain the likely implications of a rushed, nearly-there set of tender documents.  
Where you are able to get a good brief from the client, you then have to convert it into construction-industry speak, so that all intermediaries in the supply chain can price and programme properly at the tender stage – as well as deliver their obligations, once appointed. It is important to write things in the simplest, clearest, most objective way possible: give words their natural meaning, and don’t include things if you don’t know what you want.

The reviewers and approvers of these documents need enough time to do their jobs professionally. Do not just sign the ‘checked by’/‘approved by’ parts of a quality assurance sheet to get the thing off your desk and into the tender process – sign up to the tender document as something you are professionally proud to do. To find out more about tender documents, visit www.neccontract.com/contracts

Brian Wernham is a main board member of APM. His book, Agile Project Management for Government, is published by Maitland & Strong