Do you ever worry about not being able to solve the problem laid out for you? What would happen if a project didn’t end

Question: Do you ever worry about not being able to solve the problem laid out for you? What would happen if a project didn't end up being a success?
- Keywords:
  problem,
  project,
  solve,
  success,
  work
Asked by gravitygals to Aislinn, Fiona, Nathan, Padraic, Sinead on 4 Feb 2015.
- Padraic Morrissey answered on 4 Feb 2015:
  
  Hey
  That’s a great question! Sometimes I can spend ages on a problem and it seems like I’ll never make progress with it. What I do then is just break it down into smaller pieces and try to make sense of those. Sometimes I can get a bit stressed if things aren’t working out though! The best thing about where I work is that we have a great team, so when you get stuck there is always somebody around to help or give you ideas of things to try. Sometimes somebody in an unrelated area has a way of looking at things that you don’t have and that can be the key to working a problem out.
  
  Sometimes projects aren’t successful at all and they fail! This is usually the result of bad planning at the start or there were unforeseen circumstances. If this happens you try to make the best of the situation and get has much data or information as possible. So it’s not the end of the world…but you try to make sure it never happens!
- Nathan Quinlan answered on 4 Feb 2015:
  
  Sometimes I worry! However I haven’t had any disasters yet. When I’m setting up a project I try to think ahead, and do some early work – a baby version of parts of the project – to make sure we can do it.
  
  It depends on the kind of project, and who’s in charge of it or paying for it (the boss or customer). Sometimes they want a guaranteed result, so we have to be very careful. Sometimes they understand that it might not work out, if it’s a particularly hard project, and then we can take some risks. Even if the project doesn’t achieve what we wanted to, we always learn something from it.
- Sinead Quirke answered on 4 Feb 2015:
  
  Yes I have worried at times that I don’t know how to solve a problem but I work with a great team of people and between us we can usually figure out an answer. A project by definition has to end, so it will end but you may not acheive what you set out to achieve. This is why spending time on undertanding the problem and understanding how things work is so important. That’s really the job of the engineer – I remember one lecturer I had who said an enginner is someone who have fix a problem for a pound which any person could fix for a fiver. I think what he was saying is because engineers are taught about how nature and our environment works we should be able to find an answer quicker.
  By the way more projects fail than succeed and in business this is understood and accepted. The important thing is that you try not to waste too much money and time before deciding it is a failure.
- Aislinn Coghlan answered on 6 Feb 2015:
  
  I think you’ll always come up with a solution, it’s whether it’s the best one that worries me sometimes. Sometimes you have to invest a lot of money and time into a solution based on the data you have retrieved. However sometimes the data doesn’t tell the whole story and you end up missing a something important.
  
  That is what worries me the most! The companies I have worked for have a had a really good working atmosphere. If you did something to the best of your ability and it didn’t work out they wouldn’t go crazy at you over it. If it was because you were careless it would be a different story. You have to answer for your actions, but must of the time you have to pitch your ideas before getting permission to do it.