Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner by Kara Penn Anjali Sastry

Author:Kara Penn Anjali Sastry [Sastry, Kara Penn Anjali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781422193440
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2014-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

Assemble a Project Archive

The first step is to build an archive of the materials your team created. You need not prepare an exhaustive collection of everything or implement a perfect filing system. The goal is to curate a sampling of what you did over the duration of the project, time-stamped as best you can. The more representative your repository of materials, the better you will be able to re-create your project path. This portfolio will ground your distillation of lessons learned.

Start by gathering materials. Along with the more formal content you’ve created, including your final and draft deliverables, pull together internal notes, such as meeting agendas, informal documentation captured in handwritten notes, mobile phone camera shots of whiteboards, cocktail napkin scribbles, emails, comments on drafts, and notes from phone calls. Get out a few different versions of your work plan from various stages of the project and make sure you have your calendar on hand. Your Fail Better launch materials are essential too.

The resulting archive will be a mix of content that reveals insights, data, tools, and techniques. Now you’re ready to create a retrospective portfolio of your work.

Organizing your archive will help with all the steps to come. Can the materials be stored in a shareable format such as a shared drive? If you have hard copies of certain items, scanning these to file can make them easily accessible for many projects to come (shockingly often, work is lost simply because it cannot be found when needed for the next project). Possible ways to organize these materials may be by (1) project step; (2) date, week, or month; (3) key project area; or (4) products versus process.

Instead of renaming every item, you could design a file folder structure that makes it easy to find needed materials. Choose the organizing and labeling approach that will work best for your team. Make sure to create a quick one-page guide to your system—what’s included, how files are labeled, and what approach underpins the organization of the materials. Save this guide in the main directory of your archive.

Once you develop your organizing approach, enlist teammates to help locate and upload items to build the archive. To make it all manageable, set aside a limited amount of time to do this. Investing even an hour or two is far better than nothing. Some teams create “archiving parties” and book a conference room for half a day when all team members help in the task, then treat themselves to a lunch or after-work drink to celebrate their hard work.

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