By Sandra Naranjo Bautista
If project failure is a concern for you, you’re not alone. The fear of project failure has crossed everyone’s minds. And it’s more stressful knowing that failing in the public sector doesn’t seem to be an option. This article guides you through a simple method to identify if you are failing, learn from it and try again something different.
Embracing project failure
Start by embracing failure. Failing is normal, particularly when you are daring to experiment, to do things differently. In a recent article, I talked about the importance of failing well. This means failing fast, learning from your mistakes, iterating and adapting quickly, and trying again. The key is to know if your iterations are taking you closer to your goals.
If you’re more of a visual person. Think about this example from medicine. You want to avoid doing a post-mortem to know why your patient died. You want to be checking his vital signs, monitoring him closer to take timely action.
Five steps to take action after facing project failure
Monitoring is like having the vital signs of your project. For this to work, you need to be clear on what you are measuring, how you are doing it, and most importantly, why.
1. How does success look like for you?
To know if you’re failing, you first need to know how does success looks like for you. If your project is working, what would it achieve? Be very clear on your goal. I talk more about this here.
2. Break your project into manageable pieces
Depending on the project you’re managing it can seem big and hard to know where to start. Breaking the project into manageable pieces allows you to have better management of the project. For each of the tasks be clear on who needs to do what by when. Identify the resources needed as well as potential risks.
If you are not the project leader, make sure to designate one person in charge of coordinating the project. This person will know the status of the project at all times.
3. Monitor progress
Once you have identified what success looks like for you, you can measure your progress. If you have clear goals from the start, for the project and tasks, you can measure your progress in each of those key indicators to know if you’re on track.
Team meetings are an extraordinary tool to assess progress. If you do it regularly, it’s a way to go through the priorities of the week and use a traffic light system to assess the progress of each task (You can read more here and download the templates to plan the meetings and monitor progress here).
4. Course correct
The advantage of monitoring your projects regularly is that you’ll know when you need to take action. You won’t wait until the end when there’s nothing to do.
If something is not going according to plan try to understand why first. You want to address the cause of the problem, not just the symptom. Identify what’s working and what needs to change. Once that’s clear create an action plan to correct the issue.
The decisions you make are going to be as good as the information you have. It´s essential to create a system where people will tell their ‘brutal truth’, without making it pretty. For that to happen you also have to create an environment that doesn’t penalize failure. One that’s forward looking and solutions oriented.
5. Celebrate your wins
The risk of monitoring a project closely is that people could perceive that you’re constantly evaluating their performance. This will be worst if you focus only on the things that need action and not on the achievements made. The team spirit is important to achieve results. Taking time to acknowledge and celebrate the team’s wins is equally important.
To sum it up
Knowing and learning from failure is a skill that only gets better with practice. Start now, before it’s perfect. Be clear on what you are measuring, how you are doing it, and most importantly, why. Create a system to check progress periodically, address issues that require action and use the opportunity to strengthen your team and move forward.
Try the 5 steps in your next project and tell me about it in the comments below. Share if something worked, something that you learned, or something I didn’t mention that works for you, that way others can learn too.
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