Body of Knowledge · Glossary
Pre-mortem
Before committing to a plan, assume it has failed and ask the team to write down why. This legitimises dissent and brings out the risks that optimism had suppressed. It works only where safety already exists.
Where the standard develops it
- DE-4Managing scope, risk, and dependencies across workstreamsSeeing the whole, naming the risk, negotiating the boundary.
Related terms
- Contract testing
- Automated verification of the agreement between a service and its consumers, which catches a breaking change at the boundary before integration does.
- Ground truth
- The real state of a piece of work, established by looking rather than by reading a status report.
- Interface discipline
- Versioning, a deprecation policy, contract tests and communicated change for a widely used interface.
- Key-person risk
- Critical capability, context or ownership concentrated in one person, so that the organisation is destabilised when they leave or are courted.
- Watermelon status
- Reporting that is green on the outside and red on the inside.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). Pre-mortem. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.pre-mortem). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/pre-mortem