Get me 200 rejections and let’s talk…
If the only reason you 'think' is so that you could think along what others are thinking, you might as well not think at all! Life is too precious to be lived in 'more of same' format....
What can we learn from CAT’s failures ?
 (This plog post is contributed by Lt Col (Retd) Rahul Kumar, Managing Director of Srijan Consulting, Bangalore. In this post, he analyses recent failure of the Common Admission Test (CAT) conducted by the premier B-schools of India, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), and raises key questions on how one should have done adequate planning, thorough testing, backup planning and then some more! You can write to him at [email protected]) The Business Management Gurus had a PLAN – to go online for CAT. And do I hear that this was all that was required? PLANNING was ZERO!  Like this:Like Loading......
Why are more projects failing ?
Standish Group just came out with 2009 edition of their famous CHAOS Report: (text highlighting and underlining is mine) “Boston, Massachusetts, April 23, 2009 - New Standish Group report shows more project failing and less successful projects. The Standish Group’s just-released report, “CHAOS Summary 2009,” “This year’s results show a marked decrease in project success rates, with 32% of all projects succeeding which are delivered on time, on budget, with required features and functions” says Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group, “44% were challenged which are late, over budget, and/or with less than the required features and functions and 24% failed which are cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used.” Like this:Like Loading......
Art Fry shares views on Failure…
In my previous post When are you planning to fail ?, I argued that early failures were a far more effective learning tool than early successes. Those ‘gentle failures’ could help you avoid, or at least minimize the chances of ‘grand failures’. My colleague from PMI NPDSIG, Kimberly Johnson, shared that post with some of her ex-colleagues (Thanks Kim !), including Art Fry, inventor of perhaps most-well-known office product, Post-It Notes.  Here is what he wrote back: “Good article, Kim. In most product development programs you must consider dealing with failure, because only one in 3000 to 5000 raw ideas become a success. So the question is, How do you check out the failures as quickly and inexpensively as possible? Like this:Like Loading......
When are you planning to fail ?
Yes, you read it right…when are you planning to fail ? In the world where insatiable hunger for ‘success’ is an obsessive-complusive disorder (OCD), we don’t think of ‘failure’ much. It is shunned, scoffed at, systematically eliminated (or mitigated, at least), avoided, bypassed, ignored….everything but embraced with open mind and open arms. All management ideas are directed towards the age-old wisdom of “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail” and not on something like…”what won’t kill you only makes you stronger”. All project management philosophies are centred around safeguarding the projects from any possible failures…but has that stopped projects from grand failures? Every risk management action is towards making the project safe from failing…and yet we still see so many projects biting the dust, struggling for survival. Failure appears to be a social embarrassment that is best avoided at dinner...