Wouldn't it be great if you could stop a project from failing before it starts? You've seen that even the most carefully planned projects come up against both expected and unexpected challenges. Now, if only teams dedicated enough time to do a premortem analysis, they could have avoided the costly and stressful scenario they eventually find themselves in.
A premortem analysis can literally transform the way you approach a planned project. Instead of looking at what went wrong after the project wraps up, it engineers possible disaster scenarios before they've even started. You simply imagine the project has already failed. Then, you work backward to uncover why. This forward-thinking exercise lets you quickly identify potential obstacles earlier, so you can refine your plan. Ultimately, what you end up with is a stronger foundation for the project’s success.
Now this isn't classic risk management, which focuses on reacting to issues as they appear. A premortem pushes teams to think creatively before work begins. It uncovers hidden weaknesses, clarifies priorities, and aligns everyone around achievable goals.
Keen to know how to run a project premortem? We give you the step-by-step approach that might just eliminate some of your biggest project risk factors before they appear!
Key benefits of premortem analysis
We've already established that the main benefit of doing a Premortem analysis is that it helps teams see what could go wrong before it does. According to McKinsey & Company, teams that use the premortem method (or "prospective hindsight") significantly reduce overconfidence when compared with standard critique or risk analysis methods.
So how does this help? Well, it basically pushes you to land stronger, more realistic risk-management plans from the very beginning.
If you choose to do a project premortem, you'll benefit in several ways.
1. Reduce overconfidence
Excited teams become overly confident teams. For new and exciting projects, teams tend to have rose-coloured glasses on. They focus so much on the potential success, they completely overlook or undermine the possible pitfalls.
The premortem method flips that mindset. It demands you ask:
- What if this project failed?
- What could have caused it?
This approach gets teams to think critically, spot blind spots, and plan more objectively.
2. Encourages honest discussion
People generally don't feel good about bringing bad news. That's why many will avoid voicing concerns. But when that's a direct request, nobody will feel bad about it.
The preportem set up creates psychological safety and promotes:
- Open, judgment-free communication
- Early detection of potential roadblocks
- Stronger collaboration between departments
3. Improves team alignment
When everyone works to spot the risks as a team, the team gains a shared understanding of vulnerabilities. This promotes alignment and shared accountability, so everyone works toward the same resolution.
4. Enables early intervention
Premortem sessions help team members act before problems happen because you can:
- Adjust project plans early
- Allocate resources more effectively
- Develop early contingency strategies for likely failure scenarios
5. Builds project and team confidence
Once you've listed all the things that could possibly go wrong, you know exactly what could pop up. Therefore, you feel prepared rather than anxious, which is the case when you don't know what to expect.
On top of that, when you know that you also have a mitigation strategy for each possible challenge, you're fairly confident you'll manage to smooth everything out in the end.
The complete premortem process
A premortem session is not as difficult as it sounds, and it doesn’t need to be complicated. There are six simple steps you need to follow. All up, it shouldn't take more than 60 to 90 minutes.
But before we give you the steps, let's answer a key question: When should you run a project preportem?
Ideally, a project premortem should be done 1–2 weeks after project planning, but before the team becomes too attached to any one particular approach.
Step 1: Preparation and setup (10 minutes)
The first step is to get the right people in the room. Make sure you invite core project team members and any key stakeholders. These are the people who know the project best and can spot blind spots a mile away.
If possible, it's a good idea to have trusted colleagues or project management experts who've worked on similar initiatives. Their experience and insights could be invaluable.
Use a RACI matrix
To make sure everyone knows who's doing what, it's a good idea to use the RACI matrix. This will make sure you cover every aspect of the project in your premortem analysis.
The RACI matrix stands for:
- Responsible: Project leads and task owners
- Accountable: Project sponsor or decision-maker
- Consulted: Subject-matter experts with technical insight
- Informed: Anyone impacted by the project’s outcome
Set up the space
Find a space that promotes and makes collaboration possible.
You have a couple of options:
- In-person meeting: Use a wall or whiteboard divided into risk categories.
- Remote meeting or discussion: Set up a shared brainstorming or discussion session via a tool like ActiveCollab. Invite project team members, as well as internal and external collaborators, to get ideas brewing remotely.
Give everyone the big picture
Before you start, brief everyone on how to use a decision matrix to make complex and challenging decisions:
- The project’s goals, scope, and timeline
- Why you’re running a premortem analysis
- How each individual's input will shape the project's success
It's a good idea to also remind everyone that this is a creative risk-prevention exercise – not a fault-finding mission. The activity is supposed to strengthen the project plan and uncover hidden risks.
Step 2: Set the future failure scenario (5 minutes)
Now it’s time to put the team's imagination to work. Ask everyone to imagine the project has failed. Tell them to imagine an abysmal failure, six to twelve months into the future.
Get them to picture what this failure looks like:
- Stakeholders are frustrated.
- Deadlines were missed.
- Budgets were blown.
- Goals weren’t met.
The more vivid their imagination, the better your premortem analysis will be.
Make it real
Use storytelling to bring the scenario to life. This is one of the best ways to get everyone fully engaged.
You might say something like:
“Imagine we’re in a post-mortem meeting. The sponsors are asking how we lost millions and why the project missed every major target.”
When you use storytelling, you help everyone connect emotionally and think deeply about what could truly go wrong.
Keep it creative, not negative
Keep reminding the team that this is a creative thinking exercise. Make it clear that you're not trying to kill morale, but to reveal risks that typically wouldn't come up in a normal project discussion.
To push the boundaries of the participants' imagination, encourage laughter, curiosity, and honesty. This 'imagine' approach is going to unleash the valuable and unexpected insights you're after.
Optional add-ons
You can be extra creative and unconventional by using props or visuals to set the mood:
- A “crystal ball” to symbolize seeing the future
- A mock newspaper headline announcing the project’s failure
- A slide or image showing exaggerated outcomes
This approach works particularly well for visual thinkers.
Step 3: Individual brainstorming (15 minutes)
When you've got all those failure scenarios established as a team, it’s time for everyone to think on their own. Ask each person to work silently (on their own) and write down all the potential reasons why the project failed.
Request five to ten distinct reasons from each person.
Get them to write one idea per sticky note. This is important because it prevents groupthink and helps every idea shine in its own right, with its own unique insights. Otherwise, three slightly different causes might end up being grouped into one broad idea, and the variances will get lost in the discussion.
Here are some tips on how everyone should approach this task:
- Keep it specific: Encourage people to write concrete, actionable causes, not general worries. Instead of vague notes like “communication issues”, ask them to write things like "testing phase skipped due to time pressure".
- Explore all angles: Ask everyone to think broadly. Get them to identify internal factors (within your control) and external factors (outside your control). By covering both, you’ll be able to grab the full picture and get a view of all the potential threats.
- Take the time: Give everyone the full 15 minutes without interruption. Individual ideas need time to develop. The clearer they are, the greater your chances are of evaluating and developing them further in the next step.
Step 4: Idea sharing and consolidation (20 minutes)
Now it’s time to bring all their "failed" ideas together. Get everyone to post their sticky notes on the wall (if you’re in person) or on your digital discussion board (if you’re remote).
When everything is up, the entire team will see every potential failure in one place. This will be the visual snapshot of all identified risks that will help the team spot patterns and connections across different and similar causes and viewpoints.
What comes next is analyzing, grouping, and organizing all the risks. Here's how you'll appoach each of these.
Group similar ideas
Cluster similar notes into themes. Common categories might include:
- Communication issues
- Resource constraints
- Technical challenges
- Stakeholder or client management
Grouping helps the team see where risks tend to cluster, while still highlighting unique points that deserve attention.
Clarify and combine
You're bound to have some causes that create confusion. While some Post-it notes might seem like duplicates, they will actually often be different layers of the same problem.
For example:
“Missed deadline” and “underestimated workload” may sound similar, but one points to scheduling, the other to capacity planning.
So, eliminate obvious repeats, but keep distinctly different causes that reveal different failure scenarios, separate.
Create a clean, comprehensive list
When you're done, what you should have is a clear, consolidated list of unique risks that are organized, but not overfiltered.
If this is what you have, your team will walk away with a realistic view of the project's vulnerabilities.
Step 5: Risk prioritization (15 minutes)
Now that you’ve mapped out all the risks, it’s time to separate the critical ones. Not every risk deserves equal attention, so let the team decide what matters most.
Start with dot voting
Hand out 3 to 5 votes per participant. Ask everyone to place their votes on the risks they believe are:
- Most likely to occur
- Most damaging to the project if they do
Participants can place multiple votes on a single item if they feel it’s especially serious. This simple, democratic method helps surface the issues the team collectively worries about most.
Build a priority matrix
Once the voting’s done, plot the top-rated risks on a Likelihood vs. Impact matrix. This quick visual helps everyone see where to focus:
- High impact + high likelihood = Critical risks to address immediately.
- High impact + low likelihood = Monitor closely with contingency plans.
- Low impact + high likelihood = Document and track regularly.
- Low impact + low likelihood = Document and revisit later.
(This matrix helps you prioritize based on the realistic likelihood of the risk actually becoming a true threat.)
Narrow the Focus
From here, concentrate on the top 8–10 risks that emerged. Document all of them, but spend the remainder of the session developing specific mitigation strategies for the ones that could derail the project.
Step 6: Mitigation strategy development (25 minutes)
This is where the premortem turns into a real action plan. You’ve identified and prioritized the biggest risks, now it’s time to decide how to prevent them and how to respond if they happen. In this step, try to encourage team members to treat the process as if it were reality. That's the only way you can land effective strategies.
Build two types of strategies
For each top-priority risk, outline:
- Prevention strategies: Steps to reduce the chance of the risk occurring.
- Response strategies: Actions to take if the risk still materializes despite your efforts.
This two-part plan ensures you’re ready for both proactive and reactive scenarios.
Assign risk owners
Every major risk needs a clear owner. This person will be accountable for:
- Monitoring warning signs
- Coordinating the response
- Keeping the team informed
Tip: Choose people with enough authority and knowledge to act quickly when things start to shift.
Define early warning signals
List the triggers or early indicators that show a risk might be unfolding. Spotting these early lets you take fast, measured action so small glitches don't become major setbacks.
Examples include:
- Missed milestones
- Unusual budget spikes
- Delays in key dependencies
- Declining team performance or engagement
Document and integrate
Capture all mitigation strategies directly into a project management system like ActiveCollab, ideally within the same workspace where tasks, timelines, and resources live. Use clear assignments, deadlines, and progress tracking so nothing gets missed.
If you’re using ActiveCollab, you can:
- Turn each mitigation step into a task with an assignee and due date
- Use task labels or custom fields to flag risk-related actions
- Keep communication transparent with comments and file attachments
That way, your risk-prevention plan isn’t a static document but a living part of your daily workflow.
Premortem in different project contexts
Teams in every industry can use premortem analysis to predict challenges, avoid mistakes from previous projects, and plan for better future outcomes.
Software development teams use it when designing complex features or major upgrades. By analyzing where previous projects went off track, whether through integration challenges or user adoption issues, they uncover risks before writing a single line of code.
Marketing and product launch teams rely on premortems to anticipate campaign pitfalls. They explore how messaging, market shifts, or competitive reactions could affect results, helping them fine-tune strategies before launch.
Construction and infrastructure projects benefit from identifying safety, compliance, and supply chain risks early. Learning from previous projects helps these teams plan around delays and resource constraints that could inflate costs, which is a key consideration in different project management methodologies.
Event planners use premortems to prepare for speaker cancellations, tech failures, or venue problems. That way, they can reduce last-minute chaos and ensure a smooth experience.
Even organizational change or M&A initiatives use the approach to surface cultural and operational risks before integration begins, creating stronger alignment and smoother transitions.
Best practices and pitfalls to avoid
The final step in running a successful premortem is turning it into an ongoing habit, not a one-off exercise. The goal is simple: help your team identify problems early and prevent failure before it happens.
Best Practices
There are six core best practices to follow when doing a project postmortem.
1. Time It Right
Hold your premortem after project planning, once goals and scope are clear, but before the team locks into one approach. This timing keeps the discussion objective and flexible enough to improve the plan.
2. Invite Diverse Voices
Include people from different departments, roles, and experience levels. A mix of perspectives leads to better risk discovery and helps uncover issues that wouldn’t appear in a single team’s review.
3. Create a Safe Space
Make it clear that this is about strengthening the project, not pointing fingers. When people feel safe to share concerns, they’ll bring up the real issues that could derail progress.
4. Focus on What You Can Control
Encourage the team to discuss risks they can actually influence. Capture all ideas, but prioritize actionable threats that can be addressed through clear mitigation strategies.
5. Keep It Alive
A premortem shouldn’t end when the meeting does. Schedule regular follow-ups to track progress, adjust priorities, and update strategies as the project evolves.
6. Recognize Wins
Celebrate when preventive measures work. Acknowledging these successes reinforces the value of proactive risk management and motivates the team to keep applying the process.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Some of the most common pitfalls to avoid include:
- Running the session too late, when major decisions are already locked in
- Limiting participation to core team members only
- Allowing senior voices to dominate the discussion
- Turning the session into a blame exercise
- Treating the premortem as a one-time event
- Ignoring follow-up actions or not integrating them into the project plan
Take your next project premortem to ActiveCollab
Premortem analysis is one of the smartest ways to prevent project failure before it happens. By exploring all the reasons a project could go wrong, teams surface potential problems early and build stronger strategies for success.
The six-step process highlights the main differences between reactive and proactive project management. Instead of responding to crises, teams anticipate challenges, prioritize key risks, and design clear mitigation plans that keep projects moving forward.
ActiveCollab makes it simple to turn those insights into action. You can organize potential risks as tasks, assign owners, track progress, and keep everyone aligned — all in one workspace. It’s a practical way to make sure ideas from your premortem turn into measurable improvements that prevent future issues.
If you want your next project to run smoother and with fewer surprises, try running your premortem in ActiveCollab.
You can explore the platform by signing up for a free 14-day trial. If you prefer to have someone demonstrate how the tool can work for your team, book a demo with one of our people.