The Project Book

PREFACE

Projects are the lifeblood of organisations. They are used to fix things that are broken, to add to things we already have or build things we don’t, to keep organisations relevant, or simply to improve the bottom line. However you look at it, they are absolutely critical. We talk about them all the time and assume, before we even start, that they’ll surely be successful. So a quick reality check before we get cracking: usually they won’t be. Here are a few recent statistics:

• On average 34 per cent of projects around the world are considered successful, a rise of only 5 per cent in the past 20 years.
• Of the 84 per cent of organisations that said transformation projects were crucial, only 3 per cent said they had completed any successfully.
• Only one in five organisations say they are effective at scaling agile methods for project delivery, with a further 30 per cent indicating they are only ‘slightly effective’.
• Only 34 per cent of organisations deliver projects that are likely to achieve customer satisfaction.

These figures don’t make great reading (in fact some of them are plain appalling), but in my experience, they do accurately represent the daily experience in most organisations when it comes to discipline and maturity around the way they deliver projects.

Many reasons get wheeled out in reports on why projects fail, yet in reality there are only two: poor project sponsorship and poor project management. This book addresses both of these problems. It gives project ...