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IT Project Lessons from Titanic (Part 17)
In today's world, to complete Step 1 of the post-mortem you need to develop the problem statement and determine the contributing factors. To better understand how to proceed with your post-mortem, this section applies it to the Titanic disaster: What should have been uncovered by the U.S. inquiry but was not.
In your post-mortem, once you have the timeline of events you need to select the events that had the most impact on the disaster, those thought to be "problematic," before you can start to hone in on the timeline and root causes. To select these requires careful definition of a problem statement, as there might be ambiguity to what the problem is or if several problems occurred simultaneously.
For example, for the Titanic a first question about the disaster might have been, "Why did Titanic not reach New York?" The answer simply is it ran onto an ice shelf and foundered after it sailed off. However, it is important to phrase the question in a meaningful context to the organization and in this case the tragic and huge loss of life, so that the question reads, "Why was Titanic such a tragic disaster, with so many lives lost?" The emphasis was on learning lessons and preventing future catastrophes. After all, the public had relatively little sympathy for White Star and its economic loss.
A good problem statement helped determine the contributing factors to …
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"It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go." - Bertrand Russell |