Over on the inevitable blog, Cara Turner gives a great description of a Pre-Mortem exercise she conducted with an Agile development team.
Excerpt:
Introduction to the team:
This is a slightly different retrospective activity, that looks forward not back, but as if we’re looking backward. We’re going to pretend we’ve come to the end of the next sprint, and it’s been a miserable failure – everything that could have gone wrong did.
At this point the team flinched a bit – I had to emphasise that the idea is to find out what went wrong, so not to focus on the feeling so much as the causes.