Planning for Failure Can Increase the Chances of Success.

Four tips for implementing successful projects and products

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” — Ken Robinson

What I’ll tell you today may be a very controversial and interesting topic for discussion. During my career journey, I was that “Process” guy everyone hates. Who spends tones of time to both convince people to use the new process and implement it. For me, the first part was the most natural as I was very persistent and knew how to sell my original ideas in which I believed. But during the implementation phase, I was encountering unexpected circumstances that either slowed me down or were a reason for failures.
Today I’m going to share four tips that helped me personally to implement a bunch of successful projects.

Pre-Mortem

So, what is the premortem? It is the opposite of a postmortem, which means it is something that you start before any project and not after. In a medical setting, a postmortem is when health professionals understand what caused a patient’s death. While this process might benefit professionals, though, for the patient, it will be too late. A premortem is an opposite: You are trying to understand what might cause death in the future so that you can do everything to prevent it. In our startup or enterprise setting, it will be the process where everyone involved in the project can raise potential problems that can later be the reason for failure. Premortem is not a critiquing session where everyone complains. It is an assumption that your project already failed, so you can ask your team what went wrong. It will help you and your team pick up early signs of trouble and all possible roadblocks that might be in your way.

Having a Plan B

If you are a fan of action movies, you probably noticed that the main characters have a “Plan B.”
Something can always go wrong, especially in a film, as they try to keep us thrilled :D :D. The aim of “Plan B” is to provide an alternative route for developing ideas and achieving goals when a project gets tired, stuck, overly complicated, or is in a rapidly changing environment. Similar to premortem Plan B should always be developed at the start of the project, for probable scenarios and foreseeable project disasters
So, imagine you are releasing your product MVP, and you don’t know what you will do if the users do not like it. Without having “Plan B,” it will be a disaster. You will try to find reasons, organize useless meetings, find excuses, or the worst, build another crap on top of it.

Finding Typical Failures

If your project is nothing new (and it probably isn’t), then you can research other failures. The most important thing to do is find information from people who failed so you can avoid making the same mistakes. Our minds tend to research only successful cases to justify that we are right, and every project is going to succeed. Still, the truth is that everyone lies about their successes to add more colour to their stories and look like heroes of their fiction. But when you are failing, there is nothing to hide, and you have more willingness to help others.

Assume that you are doing something that nobody wants

I believe that successful projects are the ones that ultimately serve others, whether that be process improvement, a product, or any other project. To solve a problem that is worth addressing, you should assume there is no such problem or solutions are out there. You are just reinventing the wheel and justifying it by doing all the necessary research. When you do the opposite, you always find imperfections in other solutions. Or you subconsciously search in Google to find out that you are the first one pursuing a solution, and there is a huge demand. This way, you will challenge yourself to create something that can offer a spectrum of benefits for your colleagues or make the world a better place for your users.

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