Lessons Learnt form Big Failures

Apple, Facebook, Google, Netflix, OpenAI - we all know these examples of success stories. The problem is that each success story is a unique combination of many factors that are very difficult to reproduce.

It's much more perspective to study failures, as they have more or less the same reasons and show what definitely will not lead you to any success.

Here's a collection of IT project failure case studies that cost companies tens of millions of dollars. There are cases that happened for the last ~15 years, and if you quickly go through them you will realize that most problems look very common:

📍 Corporate Culture. It's not so obvious but it's actually the root cause of many other problems like unpredicted complexity, underestimation, lack of transparency, etc. Why? When you develop the system the technical team usually knows about all that problems, moreover they know whether the system is ready for production or not. The question is if they have an ability to explain that to the management and if the management is open enough to listen.

📍 Leadership Failures. There are wide range of problems from non clear responsibilities, poor ownership, ping-pong between the teams, lack of trust, communication failures and other issues.

📍 Risk Management. For any big project you should always have a plan "B". That’s why transparency and trust are so important, they're the only way to understand what's really going on and to have a chance to adjust the plan on time and avoid a complete disaster.

Software is a socio-technical system and most failures aren't about technologies they are about people. The good news is that we as technical leaders can improve that and make our projects more successful.

#leadership #management