A friend of mine runs a fairly large company and they often embark on new, complex initiatives. He has a great way to kick off every project, which I'd like to share with you.

He gathers his core project team and paints this scenario: "I want you to imagine that we are all being bribed by our main competitor. We still work here, but the bribe is this - make sure this initiative fails. Now, for the next 20 minutes, I want us to brain-storm all the ways we could influence the success of this project - with the intent of it failing."

This sounds fun, right? People get enthusiatically stuck into the task.

• Make sure that the project is not adequately resourced.
• Make the scope of the engagement unclear, so that people lose their way.
• Create timelines which are unrealistic, so that quality suffers and people get burnt out.
• Create management layers so that work is slowed down.
• Etc.

And then my friend will say: "Excellent work. We've now defined our critical success factors. Let's spend the rest of the meeting addressing these and ensuring that our competitor doesn't succeed, but we do. And then let's add ownership to each of these items, so that we have clear accountability up front. "

Project success is determined largely by our ability to minimise risks and issues.

If you agree with the above, don't you find it strange that we often jump into the "work" without first trying to be proactive about potential risks, and current issues? We often ignore these until they are material.

By starting the engagement with a list of risks and issues, with clear ownership, you're eliminating risks before they become issues, instead of chasing your tail when they are impactful.

Conversely, a recent project that I worked on finished with a "lessons learnt" meeting. I would have much preferred to have a "Previous Lessons Learnt" meeting at the start of the engagement!

If you don't attack the risks, the risks will actively attack you.

Tom Gilb

Takeaway

As a teambuilding excercise, at the start of the project, it's a great idea to perform the above task. You'll harness the wisdom of the masses, and get invaluable input from the team, which should be acted on before you embark on actual work.