Failure

Being old, excuse me, older, than many of you gives me an advantage over you in a number of ways. I will be able to get the senior rate at the movies before you and I will be able to get discounts at hotels before you. What it has also done, is given me the opportunity to fail more often than you.

One of the best teachers in the world is failure, as it shows you what went wrong and what not to do. All you need to do now is learn from that failure and try to prevent that same situation from happening again. As someone who has been in this field for 20 years I have experienced a lot of failures, both on my part and those with whom I’ve worked. Each failure has been a learning experience that has allowed me to gain some piece of knowledge such that I am able to either not fail in the same manner or at least recover faster.

Unfortunately, failure is often seen as a bad thing, and from an overall project perspective it most certainly is a bad thing. However, small individual failures are not something that should be frowned upon, but embraced. Scott Berkun, in The Art of Project Management, wrote:

Courageous decision makers will tend to fail visibly more often than those who always make safe and cautious choices.

This applies to everyone that makes decisions, from the project manager down to the developer. If a decision was made that was, at the time, the right decision, celebrate the decision, regardless of whether or not it was a success. If the decision was bad, educate the decision maker so that they can learn from their mistake. (Educate does not mean punish.) By telling people you expect them to be perfect and that you do not expect any problems, you are telling them to play things safe and not try anything new. Mankind didn’t go to the Moon by playing safe. IBM played it safe with the personal computer and lost. Risks need to be taken at certain points and we need to train all of our staff, from developers to project managers, when failure and risk, is a good thing.