Here's how you can learn from a failed project in Systems Design.

When designing complex systems it is not a matter of if you will have design flaws and firmware/software bugs but rather when you will find them. Finding them early is important to prevent quality issues. My recommendations are: - Start with architecture and design concepts before diving into detailed designs - As you write requirements, document how you will test your requirements - Unit test whenever possible, even for simple calculations that seem straightforward - Read your work as if it were the first time reading and figure out how to look at things in a new light - Complete design reviews and code reviews - Log system states and conditions for review to capture rare events - Always provide debugging hooks or inspection points

Me gusta hacer un analísis más profundo. También es importante revisar lo que se entiende se hizo bien y lo que pudo hacerse mejor. Obviamente este análisis de discrepancias muestra las falencias.

There are many ways of Comparing the initial goals and the outcomes: 1)assessing the goal in terms of percentage of the features/functionalities achieved by the end product/solution will give you a clear idea on the extent of the gap. 2)assessing the quality of the outcomes, maybe all the outcomes were achieved but there were gaps like UI was not as fast as a expected, many other UI related issues leading to an average user experience. Timelines for the project, the number of team resources, quality of the end-product/solution delivered will be able to give pointers if there were any gaps in project management planning.

Establishing clear expectations for any effort needs to happen early and then be revisited regularly until completion. Agile development is excellent for tracking customer user stories. Metrics for measuring the success for requirements/user stories is also crucial. Work can be completed, yes. But if wasn’t completed in a way that accurately satisfies the requirement then it becomes a failure.

Design services to be stateless where possible. This allows for easy replication and load balancing, facilitating horizontal scaling.

Fundamental contar con daos desde el inicio del proyecto para poder contar con muy buena información. No solo la evolución e historicidad, sino también del paso a paso y el proceso completo incluído el resumen de cada etapa

Certainly if and where such data exists (which by and large it should ) it can provide invaluable information. Again these insights can be used to improve deployed projects / systems or for future projects.

There is also an opportunity to look at how to track these assumptions throughout the life cycle of the project. This could provide triggers to look at if the change will materially affect the project and whether the plans, specifications or timescales need to be reviewed or challenged or reset.

It is possible that your planned design may not work as expected and that may be because of several reasons. It could be because of analysis gap or the behaviour or interconnected systems. There is always a scope of improvements in case of design failure. We have to analyse the gap and work accordingly.

I have found that during the project regardless of phase it’s important to revisit assumptions. But also important is for everyone to understand the assumptions. I’m of the general view that assumptions (once clarified) will eventually become part of the scope or risks or might just fall away.. but that doesn’t happen on every project.

Documenting learning on both failed and unsuccessful projects is crucial. And it cannot be documenting for the sake of documenting it needs to contain enough to equip others to avoid certain elements or to embrace and build upon others. Documenting lessons learnt should never be seen as merely as exercise to tick a box or to adhere to governance.

This is the "pay forward" aspect of learning from mistakes to not only help you to grow but to give others the tools to avoid and learn from someone else's experiences. Ultimately, it must be part of a feedback loop which enhances and strengthens the companies standards in project management for everyone involved in system developments.