This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Laurent Bossavit. Original Post: Instant recipe for project success Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts) Feed URL: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/index.rdf Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Laurent Bossavit Latest Posts From Incipient(thoughts)

The first part of the recipe is a well-known quote by Thomas J. Watson Sr, founder of IBM:

If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.

Failure is a great giver of feedback. If all you ever meet is success, you'll never find out what critical mistakes you typically make. So the above is a true recipe for increasing your successes - but that's not the 'instant' part, which is a bit more subtle and not as well known. The 'instant' part is not Watson's but mine (at least in this formulation), and is simply the following - something that any manager, on any project, with close to no effort, should be able to put into practice on the very next business day:

If you want to double your failure rate, all you have to do is halve your project length.

If your next project is a six-month project, and you want to make it two failures instead of one, do two three-month projects instead.

Caveat emptor: this recipe is "instant" but it isn't "guaranteed". It is rumored that shorter projects are more likely to succeed than longer ones. If that happens, I won't give you your money back, but I will let you trade in my instant recipe for the Corollary to Watson's dictum - "If you want to increase your success rate, halve your project length".