Question

Why is learning from experience important? Describe a time when you have learned from experimentation and even failure. What did you learn that you might not have learned if you hadn’t had that experience?

Answer 1

Learning from experience is important as it helps the individual to learn from the mistakes committed in past experience and avoid repeating the same in future thus creating smooth experience for the individuals in future. Learning from experience is a kind of evolution of the individual to a better position.

Below is an experience from which I had a learning -

I work for a consulting firm which specializes in implementing ERP solutions to clients. ERP implementation involves multi-phase process of understanding client's business requirements, mapping it with system capabilities, coming up with fits and gaps, configuring the fits while developing custom solutions for the gaps, testing the configured and developed objects, fixing the issues, deploying the solution into production system and supporting the implementation. This requires readiness at various levels and phases to ensure the implementation goes on smoothly. The project team needs to interact with client users on a frequent basis to get the required business information/data for configuring and developing the system.

I was a part of the Functional project team and our team focused more on the technical features of the implementation rather than understanding the client business requirements in depth to implement the solution. This resulted in gaps in the solution resulting in failure of the functionalities in testing phase. Later, we extended our work hours and spent a lot of time reimplementing the solution.

Our team has learned from this experience and focused more on the business requirements by frequently interacting with client thus ensuring our solution is in complete synchronization to the requirements.