The Day 90 Pre-Mortem Kit

Find what breaks before you sign.

Two tools. One hour with your frontline team, then 10 questions for the vendor. Use it on your next project, big or small. Print it, share it, steal it.

Derek O'Sullivan

Why I made this. I started out designing container cranes at Liebherr, and I've sat on both sides of the table since: buying systems, selling them, rolling them out. I have the scars from not getting the frontline involved early enough. This is the hour I wish we'd spent before signing. – Derek O'Sullivan

Why bother

Every failed rollout gets a post-mortem. Almost none gets a pre-mortem.

Gartner found that 76% of logistics transformations fail to meet critical performance metrics. Afterwards, everyone can explain what went wrong. The trick is getting those explanations before you sign, from the people who'll live with the system.

A pre-mortem does that. You imagine the project has already failed, then work out why. The psychologist Gary Klein wrote it up in Harvard Business Review back in 2007: people keep their doubts to themselves while a plan is being made, but once it has "failed", it's easy to be honest.

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  • The one-hour pre-mortem, step by step, with a worked example
  • 10 questions to put to any vendor before you sign
  • The Day 30, 60 and 90 check-in

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