Failure is work in Process

The quote ‘Failure is work in Process’ in indeed originally from Albert Einstein. Yet in our cultural context we often see failure as an extremely negative thing. Working in Tech propagates Fail Fast, Fail Often. How contrary can this be.

Let me share my own story:

A recent visit of an evening event talking about ‘Failure brings us forward’ reminded me again that the concept of failure in ‘my bubble’ it is still a very difficult one. In a corporate context, a ‘failure’ on Management Level can literally cost you your job.

So this is the crux: Looking at how we deliver software in most organizations, the entire setup doesn’t allow us to get something wrong in terms of delivery - we have tight timelines, we have deliverables and we have budget limitations.

How can we overcome this?

We recently implemented a large SaaS solutions replacing a highly individual process that has ‘done the job’ for many years.

Since we had a very bad track record when it comes to SaaS, I insisted on pointing out one process and try to validate the solution: The outcome was challenging: It took us several months instead of weeks to get this one single use case done. And even worse, after the first ‘iteration’ the process seemed to be longer and more complex than before.

So should we abandon the idea ? Pivot?

After the usual outrage in the management team another approach was taken and the whole process taught the team an essential lesson:

• Instead of trying to swallow and replace the entire old solution in a big bang and working on very big clusters- a step by step approach was taken. One process at a time.

• The processes were iterated until they achieved a positive outcome (faster, easier or simply more customer friendly).

• Processes need to be re-thought, re-structured and sometimes even re-clustered. Old patterns needed to be let go (Difficult!)

• The project team re-organized themselves so they can think of the newly designed processes end to end . The same applied to the organization who needed to operate then solution.

• At the same time they received immediate customer feedback, motivating them to push ahead.

After the team has managed to move into this working mode - the migration became faster and faster, being able to replace the old solution over time. People knew how to slice the elephant and what was needed to get the job done.

We started small and we miserably failed. But we didn’t give up on our original plan (replacing legacy and actually making things better). Imagine we would have started in the same old way: We would have started big, and fail big time.

So indeed Einstein is right: Failure seems to be just success in progress.

Let me know what you think - does this sound familiar to you ?

All the best

Sophie