How to Massage a Project Failure for Resumé Success

Dust yourself off after project failures and use them to boost your image on resumés by following these tips to learning from project mistakes.Nobody’s perfect. It’s trite but it’s true. In fact, according to the latest CHAOS report, software development team managers considered 30 percent of their projects as failures.

What’s more important than a perfect score in all things in life is the ability to recognize mistakes and failures and learn from them. As career expert Josie Chun writes, “the ability to recognize your own failings and learn from them is an important quality and will work in your favor, as long as you demonstrate the right attitude towards such experiences.” Demonstrating these types of past behaviors — the ability to pick up the pieces and make something out of them — that’s the sort of thing that can look great on your resumé.

So, whether you are applying for a new job or looking to partner up with an organization, you will want to consider actually drawing attention to any project failures that showcase your agile response skills.

Tidy up Timetables

We can all let time get away from us during projects, typically leading to some inevitable last-minute crunch time. Projects that save all of their work for crunch time probably won’t make it, though. At that point, the tasks you needed several months ago are too far gone, and untangling the mess is usually harder than starting over.

For this reason, time constraints can cause many projects to come apart at the seams. The solution for most team managers is to set tighter, more incremental deadlines so that small missed deadlines don’t snowball into huge technical debt down the road.

If you have ever responded to a project failure by creating a more rigid task and assignment schedule, let your resumé tell all. A phrase like “implemented a new task scheduling system in response to missed project deadlines, which later helped improve development times in another project” can indicate that a project failure led to a breakthrough that improved the odds of future project successes.

Be Realistic about Your Constraints

Many people refer to the “project triangle” of scope, time, and money. We think project constraints are more complex than that, but the gist is that you can’t make something out of nothing.

Yet, plenty of people try! Tales abound in the tech world of executive design decisions made from on high to add features. These curveballs can seriously bungle up what could have been a project finished on time and under budget. Team members who are able to take a stand for proper expansion of the project triangle by requesting extra time or money for implementation demonstrate that they are willing to account for factors others overlook.

For subsequent projects, a detailed scope and budget analysis process indicates the ability to act responsibly instead of indulging in flights of fancy. In other words, people like it when they see an ability to add constraint controls to a project that increase success rates.

Embedded Business Intelligence Can Save Time For Projects

Embedded business intelligence platforms can help you both assess your available resource pool and analyze progress made over time, helping with both major causes of project failure. With Izenda’s tools, you can quickly add in analytics features to your own projects through our OEM BI software or use them for your own team to make project management simpler.

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