The Project Book

CHAPTER 67 FAIL QUICKLY

Failure is something that happens to us all and it can happen on a daily basis. It needs to become something that we’re comfortable with and learn from because resilience is an important quality required in projects.

Every year more than two-thirds of projects are considered failures, and most organisations would not be surprised by this statistic. In most cases, however, failure was the result of not making a hard decision.

In the project management world we are excellent at finding reasons for failure and dehumanising their root cause. For example, here are the 16 identified ‘Primary Causes of Project Failures’ from the PMI’s 2015 Pulse of the Profession report:

1. Change in organisation’s priorities
2. Change in project objectives
3. Inaccurate requirements gathering
4. Opportunities and risks were not defined
5. Inadequate vision or goal for the project
6. Inaccurate cost estimates
7. Inadequate/poor communication
8. Inadequate sponsor support
9. Poor change management
10. Inaccurate task time estimate
11. Resource dependency
12. Inadequate resource forecasting
13. Limited/taxed resources
14. Inexperienced project manager
15. Team member procrastination
16. Task dependency.

Remember, though, there are only two reasons for project failure: poor project sponsorship and poor project management. And given that the buck stops with you (see chapter 53), you could argue there’s only one reason for project failure.

Here’s the same list paired off with the person responsible for making sure the failure didn’t ...