"Failing Forward": How to Turn Mistakes Into Success
Fail fast and fail often. If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough. Entrepreneurs hear this ALL the time. It sounds like good advice, and we're all familiar with the stories of famous innovators overcoming setbacks to achieve greatness. Everyone from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs has an inspirational anecdote where failure was an essential ingredient of innovation. But the how is usually pretty fuzzy. What practical steps can you take to turn failure around? How to Turn Mistakes Into Success: 1. Seek out criticism early and often. Instead of dreading negative feedback, go looking for it! Send early prototypes or mockups to a select group of customers, or run your new idea past a few meticulous colleagues. Failure is much more costly if you wait until after you've spent all your time and resources. 2. Get an attitude adjustment. According to author John C. Maxwell's bestseller Failing Forward, the difference between those who achieve their business goals and those who don't all comes down to how they react to and perceive failure: the achievers see it as a process, not an event. It's not a reflection of them personally or the death-knell of their project — it's an opportunity to make future efforts even more successful. 3. Set realistic goals. Don't set yourself up for failure by establishing unattainable standards. By making goals practical and measurable, you can incorporate setbacks and new iterations into your process so they don't discourage you, but instead fuel your growth. 4. Reflect on what went wrong, and then move on. Don't obsess over failure! It will only eat away at your confidence and sabotage your future efforts. Take a little time to reflect and learn, and then get right back to work. 5. Focus on the silver lining. Failure does have benefits: customer feedback can take you in an entirely new and improved direction, or make you aware of a lucrative market you didn't even know existed. Plus, you now know something about your customers that you didn't before — and something your competitors may not be aware of either. That's a valuable advantage! Follow the DroneCo Comic for More Startup Fun! Browse previous episodes of Welcome to DroneCo in the comic archive, and subscribe to the strip to get each new episode. Then follow DroneCo on Twitter to keep up with the gang all week long. Share the comic on your own site with this embed code: Webcomic brought to you by Wrike Sources: Forbes.com, Mindy Crary - Forbes.com
Top 5 Reasons for Project Failure and How to Avert Disaster
As a vendor of project management and collaboration software, we talk to a lot of project managers. And we've heard all too often that despite every obvious intention for a project to be successful, the reality is that sometimes things fall apart. My belief is that the more you are prepared to fail, the better suited you are to prevent it from occurring at all. So I asked project managers to share their stories on project failure and the reasons behind the big flop. Now I'm sharing their lessons with you, so that we're all clearly aware of what we're up against each time a new project begins. Here's what they attributed to the top reasons projects fail: 1. Poor communication "There has been one thing that consistently shows up on every project gone bad — poor communication. The other factors vary, but communication issues are always at the core of failed projects." —Tom Atkins, Founder, Quarry House Everyone knows how vital it is to proactively share information and knowledge during a project if you want to succeed; yet poor communication continues to trip teams up time and time again. If you and your team haven't set aside any time to focus on improving your communication skills recently, don't wait until the next project disaster to convince you that it's necessary. And who better to learn from than the champions of team communication — professional athletes. Take a few minutes to read this fun article and pick up some communication tips for your team: How to Communicate Like Super Bowl Champions 2. Underestimated timelines When you underestimate the timeline for a project, the result is more than just a missed deadline on the calendar. Workers have to be paid for more time, so your estimated budget goes over. Sales teams were relying on your timely product release, and now they've lost big deals. It's important to accurately predict your timeline — and Jazmin Truesdale does that with excellent risk management: "Projects fail due to underestimated time. Now, when I create projects I estimate 3-5 situations that could delay the project and how to deal with those situations and allot time for whichever would take the longest time to recover. Now 75% of my projects finish ahead of schedule." —Jazmin Truesdale, CEO, Mino Enterprises If you need help managing risk in your projects, start with our risk management guide: Project Risk Assessment (Ultimate Guide to Project Risk, Part 1) 3. Failure to hammer out the nitty gritty details "The nitty gritty is what is going to make you or break you. [Projects] start out strong and start to break down as we get closer to the deadline." —Jennifer Mansfield, Head of Customer Support, Qgiv Are you a big-picture thinker, or do you have a detail-oriented mind? Usually we only excel at one or the other, but if you want your projects to be successful, you need both. (I know, not your favorite answer.) If you're still missing part of the picture, then start reviewing past projects to see where your common oversights have been, and take those lessons learned to plan more accurately in the future. If the idea of recording lessons learned during your projects sounds daunting, use these tips and templates to help you get started: Why You Need to Record Your Project Management Lessons Learned: Tips & Templates 4. Unhelpful teams and technology just complicate things We're talking about teams and tools that cannot deliver on the expectations. Stop the madness! Fix your broken processes quickly — even if you eat the cost from ending a contract early. Trevor Ewen told me about a client project gone wrong when his consulting firm was charged with breathing life into a failing project: "In an effort to preserve an existing vendor relationship, we were forced to work with that vendor. In reality, we would've been much better off telling [the client] to pay the vendor to walk away. It was a win-lose. They delivered a broken product: we were required to fix it." —Trevor Ewen, Senior Software Engineer, Neosavvy Keeping yourself locked in with teams that create more problems means you're going to spend extra time and money hiring additional teams to fix their mistakes. Bail early, before they create more problems than they're worth. And the same goes with technology. If the tools you're using to run your team and projects are making work harder, then find a new solution immediately. There are many types of tools your team can use to make work easier: project management, document management, content management, portfolio management, client relationship management... the list goes on. 5. Management not paying enough attention As the project manager, you are the symbolic parent and champion of progress. And just like a child, projects need regular health checkups to make sure everything is growing as it should be. It's important to check in frequently with your team and offer your assistance when things are slowing down. Trevor Ewen's unfortunate failed project struggled without proper support from the project manager: "He was shirking his duties to better plan for a product release. This persisted for months, and with a remote team, it's never a good idea to put your head in the sand." —Trevor Ewen, Senior Software Engineer, Neosavvy To learn more about how to be a present manager and leader, read this article: 7 Leadership & Mindset Tips for Extreme Project Managers Do you have a similar story to share? Have you worked on a project that failed to live up to expectations? Share your experience and the reasons you think your project went wrong in the comments. The more we know and learn, the more we can plan to succeed. Thanks for passing on your knowledge! Related Reads: 5 Reasons Why Your Team Isn't Getting Stuff Done Lessons Learned from Project Failure at Denver International Airport How to Combat the 4 Main Sources of Scope Creep
3 Disastrous Marketing Horror Stories to Avoid
Marketing teams battle chaotic workflows, long review & approval processes, and poor cross-team communication, not to mention changing priorities and ever-growing workloads. Read our cautionary tales of killer marketing catastrophes, and learn how to avoid them yourself. Chapter 1: Bad process purgatory Vague requests, muddled processes, and confusing priorities kill Kate’s genius marketing campaign stone dead. Everything’s due yesterday and it’s all mission-critical priority — that’s the typical day in the life of marketing manager Kate. Deadlines and priorities change hourly, as if someone’s purposely testing her just to see if she can keep up. Kate’s pretty capable, but she’s so constricted by red tape and convoluted business processes that it’s impossible for her to juggle incoming work, meet every changing deadline, or jump on fleeting opportunities. Even though her team has great ideas, they’re not able to execute them into a functioning marketing strategy or fulfill their campaign’s potential because they’re so restricted by the marketing machine. Don’t make the same mistake! Tip 1: Simplify and standardize all your work processes. Requests, planning, tracking, reporting — everything should be streamlined and straightforward. Agile marketing methods create a truly collaborative environment that enables teams to perform efficiently, deftly manage heavy workloads, and quickly respond to changing customer needs. Tip 2: Set up templates and recurring tasks to make your team more efficient, clarify roles and responsibilities, and create a reliable workflow. Everyone can forget the process and just focus on being creative. To set up workflows for your team, start by: - Listing your major project types - Documenting the steps, responsibilities, and necessary approvals - Creating those steps in a work management tool - Using the tool to monitor progress and get status updates via notifications - Eliminating unnecessary status request emails and meetings so you can get more done. Tip 3: Save your sanity with a shared digital workspace. Real-time messaging, file sharing, task management, and an accessible knowledge base free you from searching for project information and sending time-consuming emails — which can be easily lost, overlooked, or buried in an overflowing inbox. Chapter 2: Work requests roulette Marco frantically tries to respond to every new request, and ends up totally losing sight of top priorities and deadlines. Marco’s a brilliant marketing manager, and he’s just landed on a genius idea for a new paid ad campaign. He’s pumped to roll up his sleeves and dig in… when he gets a new email notification. And then an incoming Skype message. Marco understands that it’s all about teamwork — and his colleagues are wonderful designers, developers, and product marketers. But when they need something from him… well, they quickly start to resemble children begging for candy. Soon, he’s fielding a swarm of incoming requests, shifting gears to accommodate new priorities, and scrambling to meet changing deadlines. His own high-priority projects are suddenly being pushed farther down his to-do list. Don’t make the same mistake! Tip 1: Give your teammates an easy tool for submitting new work requests, so that even the summer intern knows how to initiate new projects, and no one can submit a vague request that requires you to chase them down for clarification or redo completed work. Use Wrike Request Forms, Google Forms, or Wufoo. Tip 2: Consider implementing Scrum. It's a popular Agile project management methodology with defined work sprints, daily standup meetings, and a public “to-do” list Backlog where new tasks and requests are logged and prioritized. While it takes effort and patience to implement, you'll soon wonder how you managed to survive without it. It could save your time, resources, campaign deadlines — and nerves. Tip 3: Schedule, prioritize, and adjust your entire campaign plan to ensure you stay organized and focused on your most important projects, even when new requests come in. With online Gantt chart software, you can quickly adjust your plan to accommodate inevitable surprises and incoming tasks while making sure you'll still hit important deadlines. Gantt charts visualize your project schedule, display the sequence of tasks and milestones, note task dependencies, and show when work is on track or overdue. Chapter 3: Digital assets anarchy Nadia is about to send the final, fully designed campaign files to the printer for production. But which document is the latest, approved version: “complete-Final(V8).jpg,” or “final-draft-campaign-Oct-17.jpg”? Stefan, the marketing director, feels like banging his head against the wall after receiving yet another “final” design that completely disregards both the creative brief and his latest round of edits. Nadia, the designer, nearly strained a muscle rolling her eyes at Stefan’s vague feedback. She can’t understand why he insists on needlessly complicating the original design plan. Creative collaboration inevitably involves rehashing and revising work, resulting in dozens of files and a complicated mess of drafts, mockups, and version histories. Keeping everything organized so old, unapproved versions aren't used accidentally in final deliverables can feel like an exercise in futility. Don’t make the same mistake! Tip 1: Improve your creative briefs. Add all the relevant details, including clear objectives and full context so that designers understand your marketing goals and can support them. The creative department should know exactly what you expect from them and when, with no guesswork. Provide examples of similar projects or samples of your likes and dislikes: share Behance portfolios and/or Flickr images to create a clear picture of what you're looking for and save designers from producing work that misses the mark. Tip 2: Simplify review processes by limiting the number of revision rounds your teammates can request. Start by listing all your current steps, then decide which are truly necessary and which you can eliminate. Then build a repeatable workflow that your team members can follow every time they start creative asset production. Don’t compromise your productivity by not having a defined approval process in place. Tip 3: Name your files properly — let drafts stay drafts, and mocks be mocks. Then make sure your teammates can access all the files they need in one place, ideally a shared work environment or file repository that supports file editing and versioning. That way you'll achieve one 'Final' file nirvana across the team. Achieve happily ever after with your marketing team Share your tales of marketing madness in the comments below, then start a free trial to see how Wrike can help your marketing team coordinate efforts, adjust to changing priorities, and keep every campaign organized.
What Can We Learn from Project Failure? 5 Lessons from Project Management Experts
When you run a project, there are a lot of components that need to be managed together: information, people, time, as well as specific challenges and threats. Speaking of threats – even if you’re a seasoned professional with extensive experience, you’re never immune to the smaller or bigger dangers of project failure. If you browse blogs and online communities, as well as glance at the agenda of offline events, you’ll see what a stirring discussion it brings up in the PM space. It’s usually analyzed from the “why” side – i.e., what are the reasons for project failure? But there is another equally important question that seems to be rarely discussed: How do we learn from it? When you run a project, there are a lot of components that need to be managed together: information, people, time, as well as specific challenges and threats. Speaking of threats – even if you’re a seasoned professional with extensive experience, you’re never immune to the smaller or bigger dangers of project failure. If you browse blogs and online communities, as well as glance at the agenda of offline events, you’ll see what a stirring discussion it brings up in the PM space. It’s usually analyzed from the “why” side – i.e., what are the reasons for project failure? But there is another equally important question that seems to be rarely discussed: How do we learn from it? Back in the 19th century, a Scottish reformer named Samuel Smiles said something that still holds true: “We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.” So, what discoveries should we make, and what’s the wisdom in project failure? To find the answers, I invited fellow project managers to outline one key practical lesson they’d recommend taking from such a situation. Lesson 1: Understand your stakeholders Bob Tarne, the voice behind the “Zen, Project Management and Life” blog and currently executive project manager at IBM, shared a valuable lesson on avoiding failure caused by misunderstandings with project stakeholders: “I thought of an example where I didn't take the impact of change on my stakeholders and ran into a roadblock. My project had executive support, so I was moving forward with the implementation. However, one stakeholder group wasn't on board. At first, I didn't take the time to understand their concerns... I tried to push the work through, but they kept resisting. I finally took the time to understand their particular concerns and was able to work out a way to meet their specific needs. So the lesson was that, even when you have executive support, you still need to take the time to understand all of your stakeholders.” Lesson 2: Ensure constant communication The lesson from Terri Griffith, Professor of Management and the author of “The Plugged-in Manager,” covered the communicative risks that may lead to project failure: “My key lesson is – ensure constant communication to avoid poor situational awareness. People want to do a good job and sync with other aspects of their project, but if they don't have situational awareness, then those good intentions are just intentions. At extremes, the lack of communication then results in misinterpretations of why things aren't syncing – Psych 101 teaches that if something is going wrong, it's the other person's fault; if it's going well, it's to my credit. With poor communication, root causes can be misunderstood, adding to a downward spiral.” Lesson 3: Share Elizabeth Harrin, who regularly shares her PM wisdom in A Girl’s Guide to Project Management, highlights how important your experience might be for fellow project managers: “My lesson would be: share. There is no point in not sharing. It is better for everyone if you are honest about the failure and what happened, and tell as many people as you can. Often we don't institutionalize lessons about project failure, and the same mistakes are made time and time again.” Lesson 4: There should be no project failure As for Peter Taylor, best known for his bestseller “The Lazy Project Manager,” the advice dives deeper into organizational reasons of project failure and gives a good deal of motivation: “I think the one, big lesson we should all learn from project failure is that there should be no such thing as project failure! Projects should deliver. Now they may not deliver what was intended originally, but they should follow one of three clear paths: Deliver the expected business benefits, Be adjusted to deliver some business benefits, or Be stopped because they are not expected to deliver the business benefits originally intended, at any level of success, or they are focused on business benefits that are no longer relevant. So project failure has nothing to do with individual projects not delivering, but more an indictment of the organization that allows such projects to ‘just keep going until the bitter end’ for some business reason.” Lesson 5: Discussion -> Root causes -> Actions -> Codification When I asked the question myself – there is something to learn in any failure. There are actions to take to prevent it from happening again, and as Terri and Elizabeth brought up, there’s a lot to communicate. Here’s how I’d put it into a simple, four-step process: Have an open and constructive discussion within the team about the failure. That serves both to communicate the lessons and leverage their collective intelligence. Analyze root causes together. Work out an immediate action plan to minimize the impact of the project failure. Codify the lessons learned into processes and practices: “The next time this happens, we do that.” This could be viewed as a long-term form of communication. We could call it DRAC for fun. :-) Discuss – Root causes – Actions – Codify. If you’re in the mood for creating acronyms, feel free to come up with your own. If you thoroughly analyze the mistakes, make conclusions and take lessons for your onward journey, a failure in one project might become a step toward much better results on your next one. Project failure is an abundant source of professional wisdom, albeit an expensive one. You can get a good discount on that price, if you carefully manage your risks through prototyping, pilot projects, smaller iterations, and studies specifically built to prove or disprove your key assumptions. Something that is a failure if it breaks an operational assumption of a big project instead becomes a data point if it’s an experiment by design. To wind it up with another great quote: Malcolm Forbes wisely noted that “Failure is success if we learn from it.” Big thanks to Elizabeth, Terri, Bob and Peter for sharing their great lessons.
Startups: How to Do PR, Find Investors, & Deal with Failure (Work Management Roundup)
Welcome back to the weekly Work Management Roundup, where we bring you the best reads from around the web on productivity, work, and management. This week, we shine a spotlight on startups: how to do PR before you launch, how to find investors, what to ask job candidates, and even how to deal with failure. Read on! 10 PR Strategies to Follow When Launching a Startup (Pressfarm): You don't just launch on the day itself, you need to prepare weeks before. This article walks you through 10 steps to do BEFORE the official birth of your startup. This Is Why So Many Entrepreneurs Can’t Find Investors (Fortune): In this opinion piece by Wrike CEO Andrew Filev, he argues that startups should move away from asking for investors in order to finance their product development. Instead, new companies should bootstrap until their product gains an audience and some traction before seeking funding. We Got 10 CEOs to Tell Us Their One Killer Interview Question for New Hires (Quartz): While some of these questions resemble the eternal favorite "Where do you see yourself in five years?", there are a few that are unique. Whether you're searching or hiring, it's a good idea to take a look at what these CEOs consider the killer question that reveals the most about job candidates. Treat Failure Like a Scientist (James Clear): With each experiment a scientist does, every failure becomes a data point that eventually leads to the right answer. Therefore, when failure comes, instead of sobbing in the pouring rain, roll up your sleeves and try again. The Quarter of a Trillion Dollar App Bonfire (Medium): When 80% of the 1.2 million apps in the App store are considered "zombie apps" because they have so few users, it prompts the question: how did there get to be so many? The simplest answer: developers built their apps without first figuring out if there was a real audience for their product. A team is united when it sees the same vision. Anant Mediratta, CEO & Founder of WiseCalvin says: “Get your team on the same page, aiming for the same goal. Sit down with the team and explain your short- and long-term goal, and be open to their suggestions. Discuss how you have planned to hit those goals, and then assign each of them their respective work.” #wrike Copy and paste the URL into your browser to read the full blog post: ------->>>>>>> http://bit.ly/18TeamTips A photo posted by Wrike (@wriketeam) on Feb 24, 2016 at 7:19am PST More Work Management Reads Think About This: Why I Quit Google Inbox (Medium) E-Commerce: Convenience Built on a Mountain of Cardboard (The New York Times) How People Learn to Become Resilient (The New Yorker) Go Try This: 7 Tips for Getting More Responses to Your Emails (With Data!) (Boomerang) How to Build the Perfect Team (Slideshare) How To Market YouTube Videos More Effectively (Small Business Trends) Browse The Work Management Roundup on Flipboard If you use Flipboard on your mobile device, you can check out these links (and more!) via The Work Management Roundup magazine. View my Flipboard Magazine.
