Leadership

Project Fail: Part 1

Lessons learnt from failed and abandoned projects

Mwanja Joel

23 May 2022 • 4 min read

If you live long enough, you'll make mistakes but if you learn from them, you'll be a better person – Bill Clinton

Failure is simply a series of decisions taken over time that lead to a deviation from the main objective. Most times it's rare for people to speak about their failures as it's seen as a weakness in some societies across the world. I view failure as a turning point where decisions made are to correct the course being taken back to the objective that was set out. Usually, there is a clear trail of software projects failing and lessons learned along the way.

Move fast. Break things

In Software engineering, some tools are created purely out of passion and are rarely planned for following a well-laid-out strategy. You can find many of these on Github, which is a platform where engineers build software.

For most of these incomplete tools, there is a pattern to which they are built. It's the move-fast-break-things kind of thing where there is initial interest in the tool being built but since it's a passion project, it's created super quickly with disregard for creating a clear plan for sustaining that software tool. This culture of moving fast originated in Silicon Valley in the United States. Tools created in this style are mainly for prototype purposes so they are ad-hoc in nature i.e. no concrete plan but just created for either an internal demo, as a future reference to possibilities, or simply an experiment.

The Dry Spell

Cracks in the Earth — Photo by Brad Helmink / Unsplash

Often times excitement that comes about building a "world-changing" software system dies out thus leading to a phase where engineers keep trying to re-ignite that "fire" through the setting of reminders, getting time out of their already busy schedules to continue what they started. This quickly leads to a dry spell since the numerous attempts over time show a level of commitment that is already mediocre.

Lesson 1: Set a clear goal

According to Investopedia, one of the reasons why startups fail is a lack of research. Of course, there are other reasons and you can read more about them here.

However, what got my attention in that article was how to reduce/eliminate this failure and this is by setting goals.

Goals help us keep the focus as well as eliminate any other unnecessary and unplanned efforts, however good they might be towards making someone feel or even become better. Unfortunately, I have been part of failed projects in my software development career because there was simply no clear goal. The deeper reality to this is that many project managers assume the goal has been set and this is the root cause of the reason why such projects fail, the Assumption of the clear goal.

There are several tools one can use to set a clear goal for any given project. Here is a list of some I adopted and currently use.

To be continued .....