Project Management, initiative, leadership

A few months ago, my team was gearing up to launch a new automation tool for case assignment - a project that is key for the future, and also were we spent so much energy into. We spent weeks identifying scenarios, testing in a dev environment, and reflecting on potential issues. We wrote crystal-clear documentation and worked with a rockstar team of developers, testers, and communicators. We thought we had every base covered. But when launch day arrived, chaos ensued. The tool hit snags that never showed up in testing - edge cases we hadn’t anticipated. Worse, some team members seemed blindsided by the changes, despite our efforts to keep everyone in the loop. It was a classic “complex failure,” as Amy C. Edmondson describes in her book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well . Complex failures, Edmondson explains, aren’t the result of one person’s mistake or a single oversight. They happen in intricate systems where multiple factors - technology, human behavior, and unexpe...