A premortem gathers your team at the start to imagine the project failed two years from now, then list what went wrong: insufficient budget, wrong personnel, lack of stakeholder buy-in. Back in the present, you fix those risks before they happen.
Here's my favorite technique for making sure your next project goes well. It's called a premortem, and it takes advantage of our brain's incredible capacity for time travel. At the beginning of your next project, gather your team and imagine yourself 2 years in the future and say, this project is a complete abject failure. What went wrong? Talk about it. Maybe you had too little budget. Maybe you had the wrong people on board. Maybe you didn't get adequate buy-in. Talk about those things, list those things, then get back in your mental time machine to the present and don't do those things. I use a premortem for every big project that I do because I'd much rather make mistakes in an imaginary future than in a real present.
