fails are not the worst thing on earth

failures happens

Almost everyone in IT knows that "the only constant is change", but I strongly believe there is another constant - failure.
If you never failed before, I got bad news - you will, that's for sure. One day, sooner or later, but it will happen. But, don't worry, everyone fails from time to time and there is nothing bad in this. Well, maybe there is, but it's not so tragic as someone can assume:)

The problem is not failure itself, problems comes after it. And this "after" defines either you will lose on this situation or not.

what failure is?

There are three basic types of failure:

• You didn't try at all.
• You didn't reach a goal
• You reach a goal, but it's still not this what it should be.

didn't try at all

Maybe this is not always so obvious, but "not trying" is also a failure. So remember - when you are trying, you already partly succeed, regardless of the result:)
Without tries you cannot succeed. Of course you cannot also fail in the basic meaning of the word, but all of us striving for success and the most fun is in the pursuit of the goal, not achieve it.

So, don't waste your time - TRY!

didn't reach a goal

You missed a deadline? You didn't do everything what should be done? You skipped tests? You skipped documentation?
It happens. Unfortunately more often than we want to and want to admit:) So, what to do now? Now is time for improvements! Ask couple of questions yourself and your team.
Maybe you overestimate your possiblities? Maybe there were unclear requirements? How many times you had to refactor or completely change something? Try to identify bottle-necks. Discuss about this with your team, because more people can notice much more than one person:)

done... but it's wrong

Everything is done, whole team is happy and proud and... yeah, customer tells you that is not exactly what he want.
You don't understand what went wrong, everything is done exactly as it was in requirements, everything is tested and there is even pretty good documentation. What can I say? What customer can say? Sorry, but in the meantime something was change? Or he just didn't describe everything as he should? Yeah, you can blame customer, but still, you're the one who create a product, so conclusion is one -> unhappy customer = failure.

What to do? Try to investigate where you and customer had different vision or feature understanding. What was wrong there? All terms was clear for both: team and customer? Did you always talked about the same things when you were using the same words? Are there was any assumptions? If yes, try to not do them next time, you should be as sure as you can be.

you can fail, but don't let yourself to lose

What you should do when you fail? Investigate what was wrong and try not to do this next time. Simple as that:)
Because failure is not bad until you are learning from it. Of course this is not something, what you want to experience, but if it will happen, try to go through whole process and eliminate things, which were not good enough.

You will lose only if you will keep repeating the same mistakes and you will fail in the same way.
In other case, each failure is another step to your success:)