Instant recipe for project success
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".
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