Learnings from a failed project.

Recently, a project I was part was removed from the team, at first this feels like we failed. Failed to deliver what the project needed.

I have taken some time to process this, and to not feel that it was all wasted tim. There is always things that you can do better, in every project in retrospect. A couple of things that come to mind is team size expanding too much, to quickly and having an ever moving requirements expectations that differ between the developers and the product owners.

But even though we found that we were not achieving enough to continue on the project for now, there were many valuable lessons along the way. The team as a whole learned to adapt to the constant changes to the team and the deliverable expected of them, the team learned to adapt really quickly and accept the change. I bet that many of the team have personally learned a skill or two along the way

I personally developed my ability to lead a test team, it was a big challenge to develop some of the things that I did such as holding people accountable and answering awkward questions under stressful situations (saying a deadline wont be hit for some stories...etc).

So the project itself did not grow into what it needed to be, but we as a team and as individuals learnt a lot of useful experiences that can be applied to it for the next time that a project of the same calibre joins the team.

My point really here is that when you are going through a rough project, a project that is failing or really stressful. In there somewhere, you will usually learn something, that will be useful for next time to make more refined decisions and possibly enough that the next project will be a success!