Why project managers should follow the scientific method for projects…
…But probably never will
…But probably never will
Project strategy.
The ideal state of any project you are trying to accomplish. It’s beautiful. It has no faults. The timeline, impeccable. The goals and metrics, so perfectly crafted you can smell the promotion.
But projects fail. They fail a lot. In fact, fewer than a third of all projects were successfully completed on time and on budget over the past year. The thing is, projects, like start-ups, small business, and any venture, is more likely to fail than succeed. And this is okay. We need to embrace it.
So where’s the problem?
The problem stems from not learning from past mistakes. And the current heavy-weight champion of learning from our mistakes is the scientific method. You create a hypothesis. You test that hypothesis. You analyze the results. If you’re wrong, you start over. And if you’re right, you set out to prove you didn’t make a mistake.
In a perfect world, if you operate a business successfully, this always means periods of trial and error. Learning from mistakes, building better prototypes, releasing beta software, testing new markets…the list goes on and on.
Why then, do so many businesses struggle with this simple fact?
One reason is because of failure. Failure looms over many people. People fear failure because of how it makes them look and that makes sense. You spend 50% of the budget on something that doesn’t work, there’s no getting that money back. It’s gone! Poof! But instead of a post-mortem to analyze your results and get ready for the next stage, management often chooses to go in a different direction. Changing direction isn’t necessarily a bad thing; however, more often than not, this decision seems to be made with emotion and not an outlook for the future.
What ends up happening, is the company ditches the person who executed the bad idea, and then makes the mistake over again. They’ve essentially burned the books of knowledge and have to start over again.
And this is why, the scientific method will continue to get overlooked. It’s the reason why so many companies will fail and why a handful of those who embrace it will find great success.
But you can stop the process. Next time you launch a project that fails, look at why it failed. Was it just a bad hypothesis and can you take what went wrong and come up with a better one?