Don’t Keep Making the Same Mistakes: Learn from Experience
Experience is a great teacher, but only if you assess and record the lessons learned from each project experience and study them.
Projects can derail in many ways. You can avoid making many classic mistakes if you study the literature available on both project management and technical work in your field, as well as the lessons your own teams have learned on previous projects. Sure, everyone’s very busy when you’re launching a new project, and taking the time to study existing bodies of knowledge doesn’t seem like real work. However, examining the lessons of the past is a high-yield investment in your own future.
An overconfident project manager, in contrast, will rely solely on personal experience, memories, and the team members’ intelligence and experience to weather any crisis and master any challenge. Hubris is not a solid technical foundation for project success.
Best Practices
Take software projects, for example. People have been creating software for more than sixty years. During that time, various development and management techniques have emerged as strong contributors to project success. These are known as best practices. It behooves all project managers, business…
