A Pre-mortem and a whiteboard are a powerful combination of tools for innovation and problem-solving. This is especially true when working on a project or planning an initiative in either education or business.
A Pre-mortem is a technique where prior to launching you imagine that a project or initiative has failed and work backward to identify the possible reasons for that failure. Students can learn to visualize a
projects weaknesses and business colleagues will identify hurdles for success. It’s essentially the opposite of a “post-mortem” analysis, which happens after the fact and often too late. The idea is to anticipate potential problems before they occur, allowing you to take preventive action.
A whiteboard is a visual tool that can help capture ideas, organize thoughts, and enhance collaboration during the pre-mortem process. A whiteboard provides a centralized hub where participants and visualize failure scenarios. Presenters can write down the projects main objectives or goals at the top of the whiteboard and draw a “failure” or “problem” section and start populating it with potential reasons why the project could fail.
You might also draw up a ‘solution” section to match the “failure” or “problem” section thus both anticipating the challenge and the solution or steps you could take prior to executing the project. Once you have the pre-mortem information displayed you can map a solution to each identified failure point and map strategies with timelines, resources needed, and responsible team members to mitigate the failure.
Visualize failure scenarios by using columns, shapes (magnets for a whiteboard), sticky notes that are
magnetized or traditional sticky notes allow people to contribute to the discussion and color-coding (different color markers) to separate different categories of failure, such as technical problems, subject matter expert deficits, resource issues, research on customers or prospects or market mistakes etc.
Whiteboards are particularly effective in this process because everyone on the team can add their thoughts to the whiteboard in real time. Mobile whiteboards allow team members and managers to conduct snap pre-mortem to start any initiative. A whiteboard enhances the collaborative nature to a
meeting. The facilitator could assign team members to focus on potential areas of failure and risk.
After generating a list of potential problems, group them on the whiteboard into categories, such as high-risk or low-risk. You can use voting (with dots or checkmarks with magnets that affix to the whiteboard) to help the team prioritize which risks are the most critical to address. Once the failure points are identified, draw up a section on the whiteboard for mitigation strategies. Collaboratively brainstorm ways to overcome each risk. If you have ongoing updates or adjustments to your project, use the whiteboard to track these changes. For instance, you could add a “progress” section to monitor whether the mitigation plans are being implemented.
Overall, using a pre-mortem with a whiteboard allows teams to systematically anticipate problems, prepare solutions, and innovate proactively.
EVERWhite provides whiteboards for interactive collaboration and teaching including; standard, pre-designed with writing lines or diagrams, matte surfaced whiteboards for dual use of writing on or projection and mobile whiteboards when flexibility is needed.
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