Failures Teach
Tanmay Vora
Failures are stepping stones to success, it is said. The biggest mistake one can make is to repeat the mistakes made earlier.
An article “Lessons learned from a major failure” by Michael Hugos on Computerworld.com made for an interesting read.
While I do not agree to everything written, there are some valuable lessons I endorse. Here they go.
(Be wary of wild enthusiasm and vaguely stated goals. The bandwagon effect can make otherwise sane people do goofy things.)
(Management by committee doesn’t really work. Unless there is a single leader in charge of a project, confusion will reign.)
(Unless teams have clear and nonoverlapping objectives, they will get in one another’s way. The project leader needs to resolve disputes quickly to keep things moving.)
(The longer you spend designing a system, the more complex and difficult it will be to build. It’s best to design and build smaller pieces in quick, iterative steps.)
(Delivering smaller subsystems every few months is better than trying to deliver the whole system in a few years. Smaller subsystems are easier to debug, and people see they are getting something for their money.)