Timeline for How do big development teams learn from their mistakes?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 12, 2020 at 19:37 | comment | added | l0b0 | @Chieron Absolutely. I've worked on two multi-year projects where we had fortnightly blameless retrospectives, and I'd say they are probably the single most important ritual for timely course corrections. | |
| Sep 12, 2020 at 11:50 | comment | added | Chieron | @l0b0 it is possible to do reviews multiple times during the course of a project (Which would be preferable, considering that changes could actually improve the running project). The important aspect is that one does not dwell on blame, but tries to update the process to avoid the mistake in the future. | |
| Sep 11, 2020 at 18:29 | comment | added | corsiKa | @nanoman Beatings will continue until morale improves | |
| Sep 11, 2020 at 18:13 | comment | added | J... | @nanoman A court of law is the last stop on the road of justice, not the first. Ideally, you don't want any cases ending up there - only the ones that have proven impossible to resolve by any other means get the brutal nutcracker of law thrown at them. A company should not use its last resort first. Ideally we want to foster a cooperative environment - that's much easier to do if you dispense with the concept of individual blame and a confrontational approach to problem solving. If there are employees with performance problems, they're best dealt with in other ways than finger pointing. | |
| Sep 11, 2020 at 17:50 | comment | added | nanoman | @J... It's also a strategy used by the legal system. A company is not a court of law, of course, and the legal system is far from perfect, but it does illustrate that blame in complex situations can be assigned in a somewhat fair way, and a key ingredient is that the law explicitly penalizes obfuscating (obstruction/contempt/perjury). And you don't "prevent them from trying to dodge" -- they're free to dodge by presenting accurate evidence and telling the truth. If the truth is that they made a blameworthy mistake, then it's not unfair to blame them (but still, yes, may be bad strategy). | |
| Sep 11, 2020 at 15:38 | comment | added | J... | @nanoman Then you lose all of your good people, because now the management strategy is to shovel blame on people when things go wrong and then to use fear and punishment to prevent them from trying to dodge when you start throwing s**t at the fan. This is a strategy used by authoritarians and brutal dictators. I don't think we need that as a foundational element of growing a creative and productive team. | |
| Sep 11, 2020 at 11:26 | comment | added | Celos | Completely agree with @l0b0: this answer presumes a toxic or at best a dysfunctional workplace. I've been involved in many post-mortems (both as the cause and as the investigator) and never had to deal with the issues mentioned in the answer. | |
| Sep 10, 2020 at 20:38 | comment | added | l0b0 | Downvoted because 1) a whole project is far too long a time scale; you want everybody to learn from everybody else as part of the project, so a mistake only happens once within a single project and 2) this answer seems to indicate that the only way to learn during a project would involve blame game/scapegoating. | |
| Sep 10, 2020 at 19:55 | comment | added | nanoman | But what if you harshly penalize obfuscating and scapegoating? :) | |
| Sep 10, 2020 at 17:11 | comment | added | bytepusher | can't upvote enough, and still don't see it happen often enough. Done well and without assigning blame, a very effective tool and learning experience. I've been really happy with the outcome of some of those - knowing you've put in place improvements to avoid mistakes is a relief. Much better than everyone keeping their head down or colleagues being shouted at | |
| Sep 10, 2020 at 14:39 | history | edited | HenryM | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Removed portion directed at another answer writer.
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| Sep 10, 2020 at 11:10 | history | answered | user | CC BY-SA 4.0 |