It's a simple fact of life in the project management world: Some projects fail. Not surprisingly, project managers and executives alike want to know why—and almost all of them have their own theories.
Executives should be looking at the big picture, says Graeme Sinclair, partner with KPMG Audit and Risk Advisory Services, Wellington, New Zealand. “Failure is being designed into the way that organizations are going about projects, rather than embracing a three-part big-picture model that includes approval, execution and evaluation stages,” he says. “If businesses have this format in place, then it is much easier to address problem areas, while providing potential learning opportunities.”
executive summary
| Use due diligence throughout a project to help recognize when things are heading in the wrong direction. | |
| Unearth the root of a failing project's problem to clear the path for corrective action. | |
| Changing a project's course may result in project success, but leaders must weigh whether or not it makes economic sense to make the shift. |
Mr. Sinclair says the most overlooked danger sign occurs during the approval and execution stages. This is when an organization should take into account its own capability, the project feasibility as well as the structures around individual roles and responsibilities. “While keeping the end in mind may take precedence within some structures, the key should be on regularly assessing the capability of the people involved,” he says. “You need to have people on board who know what they are doing.”
Companies also should be paying attention to how they're deploying those people, says Fumiko Kondo, managing director, Intellilink Solutions, New York, N.Y., USA. “Because many project team members are salaried, companies tend to avoid using timesheets, and by skipping this process they are not able to account for how long people are actually working toward project success,” she says. Adding this accounting component can help companies better plan resources.
Ms. Kondo says another key reason for project failure is that there's not a strong enough link with the customer. “Unfortunately, this tends to surface far too late when the customer comes in and says that the results were not actually what they were looking to achieve,” she says. “With more solid communication, it is possible to eliminate a lot of work on project components that are meaningless to the stakeholder.”
THE SAFE ZONE MAY BE DEFINED AS SCHEDULE VARIANCE LESS THAN FIVE PERCENT, THE CONCERN ZONE MAY BE SIX TO 10 PERCENT AND THE DANGER ZONE MAY BE MORE THAN 10 PERCENT.
Somasundaram Muralidharan, PMP, Senior Vice President, Covansys India Private Ltd., Mumbai, India
Executive sponsors share part of the blame, too. “Project management is, unfortunately, a discipline where management attention is not certain or steady for most project managers, says Oliver F. Lehmann, PMP, director at large (case analysis) for the PMI Troubled Projects Specific Interest Group.
“Too often, sponsors either get lost in micromanagement or are invisible, or even both. Management attention often follows a curve that is high at the beginning, low over most of the project life cycle and high again at the end when the project has run into trouble,” he says. “Organizations must work to avoid having project managers overwhelmed by organizational and technical complexity, team size and communication channels as well as the sheer number of meetings, interviews and e-mail reports.”
Spotting the Signs
it's often possible to either salvage a project or get out before losing too many resources if a company knows the signs that mean trouble. The inability to meet a project's realistic schedule should serve as a resounding alarm, according to John Taylor, district operations manager at Gilbane Building Co., Richmond, Va., USA. “As the schedule slips, costs will increase, you expose yourself to claims and quality is often sacrificed to make up time,” he says. “Unfortunately, early schedule slippage is often ignored because many managers believe that they can make up for it. While this assessment is sometimes accurate, many times it is not. This is when leaders should diligently look for the root causes of the problems, followed by swift corrective action.”
Mr. Taylor also suggests companies pay close attention to project organization—and meeting minutes can provide clues. “Are the [requests for information] RFIs being answered? Are the submittals being processed on time? Are decisions being made? How many changes are there? The answers to these questions are an indicator of the success of a project,” he says. “If it is taking too long to make decisions or process the submittals, if there are slow responses to the RFIs or too many changes, there will eventually be a schedule impact—even if the current schedule projections are favorable.”
Deviations from budget can be another red flag, says Wally Adamchik, president of FireStarter Speaking and Consulting, Raleigh, N.C., USA. “Unfortunately the excuse provided often isn't the root cause, and the project proceeds until there is a need for yet another excuse. For example, last quarter it was [Hurricane] Katrina, this quarter it is the price of natural gas, next quarter it might be the loss of a key player,” he says. “Executives also need to pay attention to the project team's sense of euphoria because it blinds team members to pitfalls.”
Danger Signs
There are six key signs that a project is headed for failure, according to Linda Lopeke of Lexicorp Services Inc.:
| 1 | Project manager lacks solid self-esteem |
| 2 | Team members are disconnected from the project and its objectives |
| 3 | Planning lacked time and effort in positioning the project for success |
| 4 | Communications efforts take a one-size-fits-all approach |
| 5 | Reporting focuses more on form than substance |
| 6 | Lack of effort to identify, neutralize or eliminate obstacles. |
To avoid these situations, smart companies stay on top of their projects using mutually accepted milestones and performance metrics to regularly track progress and remediate gaps. They must maintain “a visible presence without micromanaging their project managers and their work teams,” she says.
Ms. Lopeke's other tips include:
Always notice when project teams show signs of personal disengagement or demonstrate a lack of harmony.
Appoint project champions to step up and get involved when communication changes flavor, but focus on and reward solutions.
Openly discuss problems and leverage the wisdom gained from past experiences and mistakes.
Limit the number of decision-makers by delegating authority.
Just adding people isn't the answer, though. “Most teams must go through some harrowing times to really coalesce, and if things don't seem to be going in your favor, haphazardly adding more bodies to the project usually increases the chance of failure,” says Lawler Kang, CEO of LK Ventures LLC, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass., USA, and author of Passion at Work [Prentice Hall, 2005]. “Team members get the hint that management doesn't think they can do it themselves, so their productivity and passion for the project declines. Oftentimes, there is only so fast a project can go, regardless of the number of people working on it.”
Getting to the Root
using a solid measurement system and a comprehensive risk-tracking mechanism can help unearth the root of a failing project's problem. Covansys India Private Ltd., Mumbai, India, uses a strategy dubbed SNAP:
- Identify stakeholders
- Identify stakeholder needs
- Derive attributes from the needs
- Identify performance measures from the attributes.
“This helps keep everything in perspective,” says Somasundaram Muralidharan, PMP, senior vice president at the company. “For example, if the schedule is an attribute, the schedule variance may be the performance measure. The safe zone may be defined as schedule variance less than five percent, the concern zone may be six to 10 percent and the danger zone may be more than 10 percent.”
If the project gets off track, getting all stakeholders involved is essential, Mr. Muralidharan says. “The stakeholders should clearly understand their roles and responsibilities in the turn-around initiative,” he says. “Usually, we constitute a task force and draw a detailed plan for the project. This plan is tracked either on a daily or weekly basis.”
Survey says…
The top 10 reasons why IT projects fail according to iRise, a software services company in El Segundo, Calif., USA.
| one | Team's skill sets are inconsistent |
| two | Too many requirements to efficiently manage |
| three | The requirements management process is overwhelming |
| four | Requirements may be complete but ambiguity still leaves room for developer interpretation |
| five | Requirements are not realistic and cannot be implemented as defined |
| six | Business professionals focus on simple requirements, not difficult ones |
| seven | Requirements are clear to the team but not to stakeholders |
| eight | Requirements review iterations are too time-consuming |
| nine | Stakeholders don't mean what they say |
| ten | Too much rework in managing traceability. |
Turnaround Time
the ugly reality is that most organizations do not apply any kind of early-warning indicator systems, according to Markus Lahrkamp, president of Droege & Co., New York, N.Y., USA. “In most cases, this leads to fatal results and total project failures in 95 percent of all cases, whereas if a project failure is spotted early on, the recovery rate is approximately 65 percent,” he says.
TEAM MEMBERS GET THE HINT THAT MANAGEMENT DOESN'T THINK THEY CAN DO IT THEMSELVES, SO THEIR PRODUCTIVITY AND PASSION FOR THE PROJECT DECLINES.
Lawler Kang, CEO, LK Ventures LLC, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass., USA
To turn a project around, Mr. Lahrkamp recommends consistent and vigorous project tracking. “Emergency meetings and reinforcement of project goals should also take precedence,” he says. “You need to create a crisis and obtain top management attention to reinforce the importance and urgency of a project. A change in project management and responsibilities might make sense, but a deviation from plan should always have consequences and be mentioned in people's evaluations.” At the same time, companies need a reward and incentive system designed to keep a project on track.
Organizations must stop, call time out, get everyone in the room and clearly state the problem, the goal and then find solutions, Mr. Adamchik says. “This may require external facilitation, but turnarounds only happen when there is a very clear direction and everyone is fully on board,” he says.
When a project is in trouble, nothing beats cold, hard honesty, according to Linda Lopeke, president and CEO of Lexicorp Services Inc., a project management consultancy in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. “Be upfront about everything. If you try hiding your screw-ups, they will take on a life of their own,” she says. “Maybe you just need a change [in leadership]. Then again, you might have to start completely over and spend considerable time mending broken fences along the way.”
Regardless, Ms. Lopeke contends that none of these actions will drive positive results if an organization is anything less than completely honest about how it derailed the success of the project in the first place. “There is no failure, there is only learning,” she says. “Perfection is not the goal. Excellence will be tolerated.” PM
Peter Fretty, a Whitehall, Mich., USA based freelancer, has appeared in more than 40 magazines, including Advanced Manufacturing, In-Flight and Industrial Engineer.