Facilitate a pre-mortem workshop that turns a failed-project narrative into a ranked list of causes.
Project Management
Pre-Mortem Analysis and Red Teaming for Project Plans
A practical course in prospective hindsight and structured challenge: run pre-mortem workshops and red-team reviews that expose weak assumptions in a project plan before it is baselined or funded.
🗓️Duration5 training days
📚Content4 modules · 8 sessions
🎓On completionAccredited attendance certificate
About the programme
Course Overview
Most projects that fail were never tested before they started. Assumptions about resourcing, dependencies and delivery dates get written into a plan and then wave through a gate review with no one asking what would have to be true for the plan to fail. This course teaches two structured challenge techniques that close that gap. The pre-mortem asks a planning team to imagine the project has already failed and to work backwards to the causes, using prospective hindsight to surface risks that forward-looking planning misses. Red teaming assigns an independent group the job of attacking a plan on its own terms, free of the sponsor's investment in a positive outcome. Participants learn how to charter a red team, run a pre-mortem workshop from opening prompt to clustered findings, and convert failure narratives into named actions with owners and dates in the risk register. The course also covers when to schedule challenge sessions in the project lifecycle, how to keep the exercise from becoming a blame session, and how gate reviewers can require evidence that a plan has been genuinely stress-tested rather than merely presented.
Expected Learning Outcomes
Charter an independent red team with clear rules of engagement and no stake in the plan's approval.
Convert failure narratives and red-team findings into owned actions inside the project risk register.
Distinguish pre-mortem analysis from conventional forward-looking risk identification workshops.
Challenge a schedule baseline and its estimating basis using structured red-team questioning.
Design gate-review criteria that require documented evidence of plan challenge before sanction.
Sustain a challenge culture by training internal facilitators and repeating pre-mortems at major replans.
Who Should Attend
Project managers preparing a plan for baseline sign-off or funding approval.
PMO analysts and gate reviewers who assess project plans before major decisions.
Programme directors responsible for portfolios of high-value or high-risk projects.
Risk managers seeking structured techniques beyond the standard risk register.
Engineering and technical leads planning complex, first-of-a-kind builds.
Project sponsors and steering committee members who sign off project baselines.
Course Modules
Select any module to see its sessions and points.
01Foundations of Prospective Hindsight and Structured Challenge
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1The Psychology of Failing Well Before Work Starts
- Explain the planning fallacy and optimism bias that make forward-looking plans overly confident.
- Trace the origin of the pre-mortem technique in prospective hindsight research and its advantage over foresight alone.
- Compare a pre-mortem workshop against a conventional risk identification session run on the same plan.
- Decide when in the project lifecycle a pre-mortem adds most value, typically before baseline or a major gate.
Session 2Designing the Red Team Function
- Draft a red team charter that defines scope, authority and reporting line for the review.
- Select red team members with no vested interest in the plan's approval or the sponsor's success.
- Set rules of engagement that keep challenge focused on the plan rather than on individuals.
- Apply the murder board model of independent questioning to a project plan under review.
02Running Pre-Mortem Workshops in Practice
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Facilitating the Failure Narrative Exercise
- Open a pre-mortem with a clear failure prompt that participants answer in silent writing first.
- Cluster individual failure causes by theme, separating technical, commercial and stakeholder factors.
- Run a dot-scoring exercise to prioritise which failure causes need an immediate response.
- Manage dominant voices in the room so junior or dissenting views reach the final list.
Session 2From Failure Causes to Mitigating Action
- Convert each prioritised failure cause into a leading indicator that can be tracked during delivery.
- Assign an owner and a target date to every mitigating action agreed in the workshop.
- Integrate pre-mortem outputs into the existing RAID log and risk register without duplication.
- Brief the sponsor on residual risk that the team chose to accept rather than mitigate.
03Red-Teaming Plans, Schedules and Business Cases
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Challenging the Schedule and Cost Baseline
- Question the critical path directly, asking what single delay would cascade through the whole plan.
- Test the estimating basis against reference class data from comparable completed projects.
- Examine resource loading and float ownership for tasks that assume unrealistic availability.
- Run a targeted pre-mortem on the critical path alone once the wider workshop has closed.
Session 2Challenging Assumptions, Dependencies and the Business Case
- Interrogate the assumption register line by line, asking what evidence supports each entry.
- Map dependency chains to find single points of failure hidden inside a linear schedule.
- Test benefit assumptions in the business case against the same challenge applied to cost and schedule.
- Run a devil's advocacy roleplay in which a nominated participant argues the plan should be rejected.
04Embedding Challenge into Project Governance
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Gate Reviews and Independent Assurance
- Build pre-mortem and red-team outputs into the standard gate-review package alongside cost and schedule.
- Appoint independent assurance reviewers who did not participate in building the original plan.
- Define an escalation route for red flags that the project team and sponsor cannot resolve together.
- Report unresolved challenge findings to the board in a format that supports a real decision.
Session 2Sustaining a Challenge Culture Across the Portfolio
- Train internal facilitators so pre-mortem and red-team sessions do not depend on outside support.
- Set a cadence for repeat pre-mortems whenever a project is significantly replanned.
- Track issue rates after delivery to measure whether structured challenge reduced avoidable failure.
- Protect psychological safety for dissenting views so challenge sessions surface real concerns.
What the participant receives
4 course modules
A structured syllabus
8 training sessions
across 5 days
32 detailed points
Applied, detailed content
Accredited attendance certificate
On completing the programme
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