The Obituary Exercise

Mike Griffiths is an experienced project manager, author and consultant who works for PMI as a subject matter expert. Before joining PMI, Mike consulted and managed innovation and technology projects throughout Europe, North and South America for 30+ years. He was co-lead for the PMBOK Guide—Seventh Edition, lead for the Agile Practice Guide, and contributor to the PMI-ACP and PMP exam content outlines. Outside of PMI, Mike maintains the websites www.LeadingAnswers.com about leading teams and www.PMillustrated.com, which teaches project management for visual learners.

  Agile   Risk Management  

Try this exercise with your team to identify, overcome and avoid potential project “gotchas”:

Get the team to write a project obituary--ask them to imagine the project is nearly over and has failed, and their job for the next 45 minutes is to describe all the things that went wrong contributing to its eventual demise. Often times, people who are difficult to engage in “regular vision” exercises relish the opportunity to list all the things that could go wrong. Perhaps given a slightly pessimistic slant on life, they can generate an exhaustive list of possible--albeit gloomy--outcomes for the project. These might include communication failures that lead to mismatched expectations, vendor delays, team morale issues...anything that could negatively impact the project.

Run the session as you would a brainstorming session with someone in a facilitator role recording the ailments on a white board (or via sticky pad notes) and prompting submitters for more detail to clarify understanding where required. If you used sticky notes, group related problems under broad categories. Review the lists with the group and then ask people to quietly think through potential solutions to these problems and take a break for 15 minutes.

Then after the break, solicit solutions (vaccines) to each of the problems (ailments) from the team. Usually there will be more …

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