The Turkey Problem

Adriana Beal has spent the last 15 years helping Fortune 100 companies, innovation companies and startups build better software that solves the right problem and aligns with business strategy. Her current focus of work is customer development and product strategy for tech startups.

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   ProjectsAtWork  

Sometimes success breeds failure. When project managers blindly apply old methods to new circumstances, they fall victim to the turkey problem. Assuming stability, they don't adapt new frameworks or solutions when warranted. Here are five ways to combine mastery and originality as you approach your next project.

Perhaps you know a project manager or business analyst peer with a stellar reputation who, despite all his past successes, all of a sudden faced an incredible failure. A project runs into costly delays due to an ineffective ideation process. A product is delivered missing necessary basic features, or requiring lots of switching between screens to perform a single task. Lack of understanding of operational requirements causes snail-paced performance and an unacceptable mean time between crashes. What could have gone wrong?

It’s never fun to watch this type of disaster happen. But before we look into how to avoid such level of failure, we must acknowledge that not all errors are bad. As studies about innovation illustrate, many important discoveries only happened by mistake. To achieve success, one must be willing to expect some level of failure as you try new approaches to learn from them. That doesn’t mean, though, that all errors are good. A common source of disastrous mistakes for IT professionals is the failure to recognize project variability. Some …

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