How does your mindset affect your results and how to learn from inevitable failures?
For the past year, as part of an organization-wide IT architecture overhaul, we have been working on reengineering our frontend solution, moving from Drupal 7 to a fully decoupled solution involving Angular 6, Drupal 8, NodeJS and GraphQL. Besides being an amazing technological journey involving a great deal of learning and discovery, such a transition also presents a significant management challenge.
Being a fairly large organization, we have well established project management and development processes. But when kickstarting a completely new technological setup, treating it like R&D initiative to build a proof of concept yields better results. The question is how do you smoothly transition from R&D phase to standard project management flow? If you had the POC built by people who were new to the team, how do you integrate current team members with vast business knowledge to the project and accelerate their professional development while still supporting the existing solution? On top of that, our team has grown to almost twice its original size in less than a year and we needed to reorganize and utilize internal and external resources efficiently to make everything work seamlessly in a highly distributed environment.
While discussing issues we have faced, I will focus on mindset as the crucial element deciding the outcome. Not everything goes flawlessly. Sometimes, you can solve a problem directly, sometimes you can creatively avoid it and sometimes the problem is simply an opportunity for improvement. To expand problem-solving capabilities, you have to abandon your comfort zone and understand change as a driver of growth. Rather than wasting energy on attributing blame, start seeing failures as a companion of progress and look at problems as opportunities to learn and grow. This approach will help you become more efficient in your job and bring less stress to yourself and your co-workers.
