Disclaimer: The views & Opinions expressed in this article by an Author is not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company where author is associated with currently.
“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” – Bill Gates
Introduction: Success & failures are part of journey – personal as well as professional progress. When it comes to project management, every project brings unique set of activities, challenges and opportunities to learn from it. “Failed projects” brings scope of improvement, refine the strategies, draw the new path which was not explored and ultimately help us to achieve greater success. Here are some key steps to learn effectively from failed projects. Though this article written keeping Pharmaceutical Project Management professionals, it will be useful for others as well.
Step-1:
Understand the term “failure”
In my experience, I have realized that the term “failure” is many a times misunderstood or misused. Does failure mean loss (any measurable form- customer, financial or opportunity) or No Gain or less Gain or not meeting the expectations?
Let’s take one hypothetical example – One new product (A) was identified just 24 months before the launch date as big opportunity for the company if launch date hit timely and project manager was asked to deliver the same as expected by the management. During assessment it has come out that in best (most aggressive approach) scenario assuming everything goes right with no limitation of budget & resources- project requires minimum 18M for submission of dossier to respective country authority and minimum 12M required for authority to approve if no or minor queries come up. Now assume that I) the project A got delivered (ready for launch) in 28 months. Should we consider this as failure?
II) The Product (A) got launched in 30 months – the product sales & profitability was 20% less against original estimation considered during project selection. However, there was minimum impact on return on investment against the business case estimated during project identification stage. Should we consider this as failure?
In my view both I) & II) should not be considered as “failure” for project managers.
What is failure, then? A project or Program or strategy is considered as “failed” if it does not meet it’s objectives/deliverables. In case of Project, budget & timelines are the key criteria for assessment. Objective is also considered as “return expected”. If project failed, means it did not deliver the required return on investment.
New opportunities for growth will keep coming, which will trigger to add new projects to complete with aggressive timelines, however such aspirations/expectations must be weighed against the current on-going priorities, resource load matrix and with realities of timelines. Well, this does not mean that everyone should work with their comfortable timelines compromising growth of companies. Leaders should bring aggressive goals (aim) to the team to bring their best to achieve it and team members should be appreciated for their extraordinary efforts.
Don’t fear failure — not failure, but low aim is the crime. In great attempts, it is glorious even to fail. ― Bruce Lee
Let me share another example to understand about failure-
In one of the companies I worked, I was assigned a project which was impossible to achieve against budget considered. I have raised the concern on day 1 that we will be in loss at the end with this project. My email has gone to SBU (Strategic Business Unit) head who later has given go ahead to the project. The reason for go ahead was the company wanted to go ahead in peptide chemistry, and it was first project won by business colleague. The project would bring new learnings for the team. Yes, there, was right thought process behind the go ahead. Finally, product delivered in 2nd attempt with utilizing 22% extra budgeted cost and deliverables delayed to 4 months from baseline timelines. The project helped us to connect with other SBU team to gain more understanding about “Lyophilization, preparative purification, agglomeration, peptide chemistry understanding etc”. We all were happy as we had great learnings. However here project did not meet budget & timelines.
Do you consider this as failure? 🙂
Most of the times, the term failure is linked with someone’s fault and that’s where the Blame game starts. Interpretation of failures should not be done to benefit to Someone. Therefore, it is important that organization/stakeholders must understand the failures.
Below Image-1 will give readers more clarity about which failures are Blameworthy, and which are Praiseworthy.
Step-2
Assessment of Failure
The first thing to learn from failure is understanding the failure itself, then it comes to assess the failure to learn from it. To assess the failure, it is important to have structured forum “a kind of project closure meetings” for all projects- completed or terminated.
All the praiseworthy failures mentioned in image-1, should help us in better planning, process simplifications, outcome of experiments should be shared and discussed with larger groups for their views. Stakeholders should be appreciated for experimentation if well aligned. As all good ideas should be documented in the context of situation for future projects. Praiseworthy failures create culture of people to share new ideas and freedom to do new things (experiments). Such approach helps company to boost the growth with people contributing to new systems, processes, cost optimization, innovation.
The blameworthy failures are the ones which required thorough assessment with respect to People skills, Intent, Stages where it failed, Project planning & controlling, wrong or delayed decisions, Ideas which did not work, risk management etc. When projects are considered as failed, to assess better, which stage (milestone that had impacted) & phase (5 phases of project management) has deviated hitting the variance against the budget/timelines should well studied. Perceptions has no presence in doing assessment of project failures. If person has committed a mistake, we should know that s/he was aware about mistake. When did s/he realize and when did S/he inform? Did S/he allow him or her to express the views? If the person did not inform anyone despite knowing, does this mean fear of losing job at that time. Does psychological safety was a reason? All such things should come out to create better learning from the failures.
Step-3:
Learning from the failures post assessment
“It’s failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.” – Ellen DeGeneres
Now here comes the third step of learning from failures. Learning is linked to proper assessment of failures. Because failure is other way SIP (“Success in Progress”).
Where things have gone wrong- Initiation, planning, monitoring, controlling or lack of resources, attrition during executions and therefore improper handover, missing check points, lack of intent, scale-up challenges, motivation of team members, not identifying or ignoring the risks or uncertainties etc.
Poor understanding of product characteristics/guidelines/clarity of objectives/Unreasonable requirements with deadline which can’t be achieved – such outcomes as assessment of failures generally linked to 1st phase of project management “Initiation”. E.g. someone working on molecule like Levothyroxine to make formulation which is known for potency loss. If in the beginning the same risk is not factored and realized during mid of the project which caused the delay and ultimately failures, should have been considered as “Phase-1” failure. The learning from such product should be linked to literature search which should cover stability challenges related to product reported in literatures. As a learning, the risk management master should have check point about known challenges related to molecule as Stability, Solubility, Bio-variability, Bioavailability, OEL category (Safety), desired polymorphic form, etc. This helps for stakeholders to do specific search for literature and confirm in the beginning therefore having right developmental strategy.
If project failures concluded during mid of the execution linked to missing or ignoring any minor tasks, then, checklist related to stages or milestones should be updated based on the experiences during past projects executions learnings and circulated to the team members. Effecive phase gate meetings with active participations of all stakeholders can be way forward for future projects. This will help to go better in avoiding risk in future projects with similar categories.
At the end of every project completion during project closure meeting, project kick-off meeting note also should be reviewed and compared. Learning from each phase / milestone should be captured with overall learnings from the projects. Such document should be shared and discussed with other groups as well and made available for references to further enhance the learnings.
Conclusion:
There can not be 100% success rate in all execution. Having right/ structured way of understanding, assessing & learning from failures, will bring great benefit to the future projects’ success and therefore bring growth to the companies.
As an organization, learning strategies should be promoted and rewarded keeping following in consideration-
- Build a learning culture
- Create psychologically safe environment
- Detecting failures early – it is okay if mistake happened by person and reported by early
- Analyze the failure
- Promote the experimentation.
“Failure is success if we learn from it.” – Malcolm Forbes
Nice