Saturday, February 28, 2009

Not this time

Today was the due date for our delivery milestone of the game we are working on and we failed, we failed really huge. We had a lot of plans and at the end could not even deliver ten percent of what we had hoped for. Although a lot of work was done by the whole team, specially the day and night efforts during the last few days, but we just could not put everything together the way they were supposed to be. Another big lesson to learn about our shortcomings for the development process. Although we traversed new paths for this milestone and tried to experience a few things we hadn't before. We'll have to focus more and more. My only plan now is to dissect the experience and find out the avoidable problems. I already feel more strength.

4 comments:

not-nietsche said...

i guess you guys are still far from failure. not reaching a milestone, i believe is not failure but could be teh foundation of a failure. i say you fail if at the end you coudln't deliver what you are supposed to deliver. you didn't reach the milestone true, but it's not failure. it's a warning though.
projects basically and usually fail at the beginning. it could be through bad resourcing (especially in IT projects were mostly is done by human resources and competency and commitment of individuals plays a major part), through late mobilisation or through bad planning, financing is not in time, etc.
an unrealistic plan is just as bad as a bad plan or no plan.
but that's history now, for you. if i were in your shoes, my challenge now would be:
1- to maintain a good level of morale in team
2- to develop a realistic catch up plan with tangible milestones. something that when it is reached, my team would have a feeling of achivment.
lessons had been learnt and should be used for future.
i guess you should somehow translate your strenght to your team members, if they don't already have that and look forward.

Amir H. Fassihi said...

You are correct. Thanks.

yzt said...

I have to disagree with you Amiross, that we could not even reach 10% of our goal.
I can say with great certainty that we did deliver more that eleven or twelve percent of what we planned to do!

Xerxes said...

Sorry Boss,
But I have to write some quotations regarding Failure:

Pursue failure. Failure is success's only launching pad. (The bigger the goof, the better!)

Tom Peters (1942 - )

U.S. management consultant and author.

or:

In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably.

Joseph Heller (1923 - 1999)
U.S. novelist.