Over the past ten weeks I've listed the top ten ‘causes’ often cited for project failure. But as we have seen they all turn out to be just symptoms of poor project management. 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. At the risk of offending my friends in the PMI, the answer is not to send them all on training courses. What I believe we need to do is to develop (not train) 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 over the next few weeks.
2 comments:
I don't disagree but it's also a sad truth that lots of PMs are set up to fail by being asked to lead projects without the skills or experience they need. When they subsequently fail this is glossed over and rarely explored as part of lessons learned exercises
I have to agree with Rhys. One of the biggest issues that project managers have is simply not being skilled or experienced or skilled enough to lead certain project.
Also, I'm looking forward on reading your take on how to develop project managers and organizations, sounds very interesting.
Post a Comment