I disagree, Risk Assessment is the process of assessing what could go wrong. In the Pre-Mortem, you take a different approach, and take, as a given that the pr

I disagree, Risk Assessment is the process of assessing what could go wrong. In the Pre-Mortem, you take a different approach, and take, as a given that the project has failed, so now you are not discussing what could go wrong, but what did go wrong. It's a subtle, but important distinction. As the article notes, that once you have an image in your mind of a failed project, you come up with a somewhat different analysis than if you are trying to picture what could wrong. I frequently see attitudes in risk-assessment, particularly in those that have planning responsibilities, where people actually get quite defensive when people are pointing out the risks in the project, to the point at which others in the room no longer wish to participate. On the flip side, if we are presupposing things went really wrong, and everything failed - it almost becomes a game to figure out what went wrong. I'll take it one step further - at a tactical level, when my engineers/technicians are preparing for a complex change in our IT environments, and they do their walkthrough, and demonstrate the change is guaranteed to work - that is just the first, almost minor step. The second, much more important one, is to then find at least three ways in which the change will fail. Getting something to work might only take a few hours. Finding out how the change will fail may take several days, or even weeks - but it's much more informative and useful to the change control procedure than demonstrating something will work, and I find the mindset of "accepting and looking for failure, rather than resisting it" is the key.