I’ve worked with a number of IT orgs over the years. We often start meetings with the concept of failure – “we” they say “can’t do that” and then they talk about the previous projects they have had that have failed.
“failure” they say is the biggest driver in starting new projects. While I can see that, and often agree with the concept that failure is a critical component of success, I then ask them about the post mortem process they undergo.
How do you go from failure to success? The first thing is you have to learn from where you have failed in the past. You have to do a serious root cause analysis of the overall concepts of failure.
- Why do your projects fail?
- planning?
- too much planning
- too little planning
- Capacity
- too little
- too much
- too new
- Skills
- Our people can do the job
- Our people cannot do the job
From here, the other considerations would be do you select the right technology up front?
Do you always upgrade one version behind the shipping version?
How are business requirements captured?
Do you have a traceability matrix for your solution? Can you show the changes over time?
How do you capture and manage risk? Do you share relevant risks across all projects?
How do you do your operations today?
How do you do change management?
All of these questions, brought together in a single document will show the post mortem of a project. Over time, successfully talking about where you have failed will result in a decrease of the failure points within your projects. Edison tried over 200 combinations before he got the right one to create the light bulb. He however never called the first 200 failures – they were simply tests that didn’t produce the expected results.
.doc