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Making Mistakes
This morning, over my first Diet Mtn. Dew, I got a comment about the blog. I can't repeat all the language invovled, but suffice it to say the author was displeased. I think his words were that I was "so ******* boring I am going to go and kill myself as soon as I click post."
Aside from supplying the bullets and sending flowers to the funeral, there's not much I can do for this poor soul.
There are two types of people in the world: people who screw up and people who don't try. There are no other types. And this is a lesson for program management.
Over the last fifteen years, I have dealt with quite a few managers who never wanted to make any mistakes. They were all abject failures. This is a very poor strategy for winning at anything.
Read this book -- Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins, by Farson and Keyes. The trick is to make a lot of mistakes -- all the time -- but to make many small ones. If you can make a mistake in a day and move on, you are ahead of the game, my friend.
A good friend of mine writes a "story of my life" blog. He hasn't written very much -- I'm afraid he is always trying to write the "perfect" entry. That's a noble goal -- anybody writing content wants the best material possible. But better to try a thousand times and fail, then only try seven times and still fail. Failure is the only path to success.
In project management, we try to keep our options open. As long as we're not forgetting anything, we should strive to solve things as quickly as possible. And that usually means trying out different ideas early on in the process. Early on, these are "big picture" ideas: what if we used XML, what if we cached-forward our entire datastore, what if we tried a new architectural platform. Later on, these "mistakes" get smaller: can we denormalize for program improvement, should we include bug tracking as an integrated part of the product.
Program Management is similar. When we deal with program management, we are talking about significant business change. Just like in systems deployment we gather requirements, in program management marketing research and market validation are our driving factors. There's a lot of material here that I'm not diving into. The point is, however, that market validation ALSO has to be a series of trial-and-error. It's not "push" (we know what you want), and it's not "pull" (we are only responding to market research). It has to be a conversation with the market. And that means making a lot of mistakes as quickly as possible. This is a good lesson whether you are a blogger, a programmer, a project manager, or running a PMO.
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