Friday, June 19, 2015

Why Projects Really Fail

To recap:

The Real Cause
Earlier in this blog I listed the top ten ‘causes’ often cited for project failure and then examined them one by one. They all turn out to be just symptoms of poor project management or selecting the wrong project. But a wise project manager would also deal with the wrong project, so let's bite the bullet, the real reason projects fail is just poor project management.

Wise project managers are aware of these symptoms as they will have learned about them the hard way from their own early projects. They take the necessary steps to ensure they don’t have these problems in future on their projects. 

But that still leaves us with the problem of what to do about the unwise project managers whose project run into problems or fail altogether. The answer is not to send them all on training courses. What I believe we need to do is develop the project managers, develop the organisation, select the right projects in the first place and then regularly review them. I'll be expanding on these topics again over the next few weeks.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This is a really interesting perspective to take. I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying, though. I'm sure there's a great deal of projects that fail because they're managed poorly as well as being the wrong project. It's tough to distinguish between the two, like you alluded to. I think having a high-quality project manager is the way to determine whether or not something is the right project. You essentially just remove one of the variables. http://www.altran.com.au/services/project-management.php