The Project Book

PART VI RESULTS

I’ve noted that consistently good project results are hard to come by, yet most organisations continue to think they’re doing a great job. It’s got to the stage where project failure has become so commonplace that we’ve started to see it as success, or we just aren’t seeing clearly at all. To illustrate this disconnect, in a recent KPMG survey of New Zealand businesses, 61 per cent of organisations surveyed believed project success rates were improving, despite the fact that they weren’t!

Thinking every project will be successful is the root cause of many project problems; there is simply no data to indicate that will ever be the case. Indeed, IBM found that only 41 per cent of projects ever hit their project plan targets. For the New Zealand businesses surveyed in the KPMG study, the figure was 33 per cent.

Today we expect every single project to be successful, but even when they aren’t we convince ourselves they are rather than admitting they failed!

The Victorian Ombudsman’s report into failed ICT projects found, ‘Too often, there was muted acceptance that all ICT-enabled projects go wrong’. This needn’t be the case. It’s important to recognise at the start that not every venture will be successful.

Maybe it’s time we planned to fail more in order to succeed more?

In The New Rules of Management, Peter Cook uses a school analogy to highlight the folly of thinking that every single project will be successful: ‘Failing 50% of your subjects or your exams is not ...