Austin

1601 E. 5th St. #109

Austin, Texas 78702

United States

Coimbatore

Module 002/2, Ground Floor, Tidel Park

Elcosez, Aerodome Post

Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu 641014 India

Coonoor

138G Grays Hill

Opp. BSNL GM Office, Sims Park

Coonoor, Tamil Nadu 643101 India

Laguna

Block 7, Lot 5,

Camella Homes Bermuda,

Phase 2B, Brgy. Banlic,

City of Cabuyao, Laguna,

Philippines

San Jose

Escazu Village

Calle 118B, San Rafael

San Jose, SJ 10203

Costa Rica

News & Insights

News & Insights

The “Pre-mortem”

Every project manager has conducted a “post-mortem” after their big product has launched or their information service redesign has rolled out to their customers. Nits are picked, fingers may be pointed and, on occasion, heads can roll. In these days of pervasive predictive analytics, though, can we realistically prevent major process errors from occurring so post-mortems are not needed in the first place?

The idea is a simple one: Assign a small team to break what you are building before someone else finds the vulnerability. It’s similar to what ‘white-hat’ hackers do. The team anticipates and mitigates negative process outcomes in-house before enterprising customers discover the problems themselves.

The types of problems discoverable via a pre-mortem include:

  • Back-door ways to circumvent access permissions so the 1-week free trial subscriber can’t download the entire database on day one.
  • Search engine optimization fails that hide the fact that high-quality content is available on your service.
  • Advanced searches that yield no results and don’t offer a way out of the dead-end.

Once discovered, problems like these can be tested and resolved before they are made public. For instance, adding a “Do you mean X?” mechanism to refine a search, giving the users the chance to make a custom data request, or suggesting coverage of a particular subject area can steer users to useful content and improve customer satisfaction even when a search result is unsuccessful.

So when it comes to the performance of your new or improved information service, maybe conducting your own ‘pre-mortem’ before you launch is a better alternative than the traditional post-mortem. The job you save may be your own!

Keep on top of the information industry 
with our ‘Data Content Best Practices’ newsletter:

Keep on top of the information industry with our ‘Data Content Best Practices’ newsletter: