Leverage Your Lessons

In today's fast-moving market, software project teams don't have time to make several attempts to meet a customer's requirements. Teams need to be smart about what they do learning from the experiences of colleagues within their own organization and in the industry. In short, teams need to take the time to do things as “right” as they can because they don't have time to do things over. Why do we often have to do things over? Why do we repeat the mistakes of the past? It's related to this: Insanity is doing things the same way we did them before, but expecting different results. It's hard for a team to get better at what it's doing if it doesn't think about its work and how to improve it. Some project teams do, in fact, think about how and why their projects worked. They gather and document lessons learned. Some teams share that information with others in their organization, and a few teams attempt to review what others have learned as they start a new project or new phase of a project. But many teams do none of this. They're the ones that encounter the same problems over and over again, attributing them to bad luck when, in fact, poor project learning and poor organizational learning are the underlying causes