Prenatal Exercises for Your Project

If you have ever been part of a postmortem exercise, you probably remember it with less than fond memories. The goal of the postmortem is to record the successes, failures, and issues that arose during the project so that they can be documented as "lessons learned" and acted upon in future projects. A member of the team, usually the project manager, gathers all the important players together at the completion of a project to go over the good, the bad, and the ugly. By this time, most members of the team, especially the Test Team and Development Team, are sick and tired of the application and the problems they ran into. The last thing they want to do is dredge up problems that are better left alone. What is that saying about "letting sleeping dogs lie"? More times than not, this activity can turn into a finger-pointing exercise where inadequacies in the project are blamed on groups or individuals. This, in turn, can lead to building up more walls between departments and hindering the success of future projects. Many times, this information is then stored in some directory on the network, rather than acting on the findings to institute process improvement.

I propose that the postmortem exercise, even if done well, is a less than optimal way to gain process efficiencies crucial to the success of any IT project. More appropriately, prenatal exercises are in order. "What are prenatal exercises?" you may be asking yourself.

From the Latin root, "prea" or "pre" meaning before, and "natalis" or "natal" meaning being born, the word may be used to define activities that take place before the birth of a project that help ensure its success. In this article, I plan to outline a very simple yet powerful way to organize the activities associated with any project before the project begins.

With any new idea, it is important that the people involved understand the benefits. Here is a list of ideas that you should share with people at your company regarding the benefits of prenatal exercises.

Expectations for the project are set up front .
By explaining the importance of the project and how it will be completed successfully, team members can start to envision their roles and how they will fit into the big picture. Joyce Kosman, a managing consultant at Spherion Corporation, refers to this approach as DIRTFT (pronounced "dirty feet") or "Doing It Right The First Time." ¹  By setting
the parameters for the project up front, many problems or risks can be resolved before they occur. "Many times you see a project start without any forethought. Setting up some basic rules up front could prevent a lot of misunderstandings down the road," says Ms. Kosman. "Instead of figuring out what we did wrong (and right) at the end of the project, define as many processes and procedures as possible prior to the start of the project so potential failures can be mitigated."