Why Projects Fail
May 14, 2008 by Roland Reinhart
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Learn how to identify tell tale signs leading up to catastrophic project failure.
Listen to this podcast: [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/New-Media-Sandbox-007/NMS-007-why-projects-fail.mp3]
So why do projects fail? In my experience and opinion:
- Poor planning — failing to carefully capture and make decisions on all requirements, how to execute, how to define budget, and how to properly allocate resources.
- Not setting client, stake holder and/or internal expectations in order to hold people accountable.
- Unrealistic due date that is not tied to specific business need or resource commitments.
- No defined timeline to set expectations and dependencies for all required resources.
- Lack of clear leadership, decentralized leadership and poor project management.
- Poor/no requirements clearly defined — vague functional and technical requirements opens the door to misinterpretation and scope creep.
- Scope/feature creep — many little things add up quickly.
- No change control system to document and prioritize decisions.
- Not enough time for development and proper testing forces shortcuts and introduces more bugs.
- Same resources working on multiple high priority projects divides focus and increases risks of errors, confusion and missing deadlines. There are only so many hours in a week.
- Requirements exceed budget, in turn profitability suffers as scope creep escalates.
- Client / stake holder is not required to approve deliverables at specific milestones and freeze features.
How to lead a successful project:
- Continually learn from mistakes. Hold project post-mortems to help be better prepared for new projects.
- Estimates approved by internal department representatives.
- Clearly define leadership and who manages certain relationships.
- Excellent communications.
- Thorough documentation.
- Aggressively managing scope creep.
- Manage client/stake holder expectations.
Share your thoughts or project from hell stories.
Thanks for listening!
-Roland
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Mm. good advice here. Twice, no, thrice! I’ve worked on designing training programs for companies and had them tell me (when I’m FINISHED) “yeah, we don’t need that anymore”. The problem was, it took me three times to learn to gain a deposit first before I wasted a month or so designing it.
Since I’ve insisted on the deposit, (or a contract outlining payment) interestingly, only one company has gone ahead, but I’ve stopped wasting time designing things for a whim in some manager’s mind.