Lessons Learned or How to avoid Project Management Failures?

Being a project manager is all about maintaining a delicate balance. You have to balance leadership with management, analytical thinking with creative persuasion, and relationship-building with effective delegation.

Project management is definitely no stranger to mistakes and failures. A recent Gartner user survey shows that these mistakes can be quite costly:half of projects that fail have a budget of over a million dollars. But what do they mean by failure?

They mean the solutions fundamentally did not do what was agreed, or they missed deadlines, or came in over budget. Indeed, half of the projects exceeded budget by 200%!

I've scanned the Internet and read all sorts of articles and research on project failure, and consolidated them into a long list of reasons why IT projects most commonly fail.

Incorrect Financial Planning and Budgeting

It’s a well-known fact that’s become somewhat of a joke among project managers that most projects end up going over budget. According to PMI’s research, almost one-third of all projects run over-budget.

Now, this can happen for dozens of different reasons, but there’s always one common denominator after everything is said and done: the project might not have gone over budget if it was planned out in a better way and more strategically.

There are many well-known examples of this, such as:

• Montreal Olympic Stadium – 1990% over budget
• Sydney Opera House – 1357% over budget
• Hubble Telescope – 525% over budget
• London Olympics – 265% over budget

'Too many cooks in the kitchen'

The lack of a PM hierarchy becomes especially dangerous when decisions have to be made regarding proposed project changes. When there are several people in governance positions, it can be hard to come to an agreement on which direction, if any, the project should move in.

Advice: Clearly define who your project stakeholders are and take steps to understand each person’s level of interest in and impact on the project. Doing so can help you identify overlaps in governance, so you can resolve them before the onset of the project.

Over- or Understaffing

Recently, Netflix released a documentary about the failed biotech company Theranos. According to the movie, the company turned out to be completely unsustainable – instead of successfully “fake it until you make it”, they just got around to the first part. One of the most astonishing facts about this Silicon Valley fairytale-gone-bad: at its peak, the company had over 800 employees!

In this case, we’re talking about top engineering, biology and science talent worldwide, so you can imagine their yearly wages multiplied by 800. No matter how much funding this company could get, it would always be hindered by this huge number of employees in its early startup stage.

Therefore, it’s very clear: having too much or too little staff on a project will have a direct impact on its results and success. Try to be as precise as possible while projecting the number of hands on deck you will need, but don’t avoid growing or cutting down just because that’s not what you initially planned.

According to Gartner, only 1% of projects fail due to technical reasons. An overwhelming majority of failures can be attributed largely to organizational skills.

Bad Risk Management

Unexpected risks always appear unexpectedly. That’s why you need to anticipate such risks and develop the organizational robustness to tackle them.

This is a two-step process:

• Document all potential risks before the start of the project
• Create a risk management plan to tackle these risks

Potential risks to a project can be many, but you can broadly divide them into two categories:

1. Implicit risks: risks related to the structure, nature, or scope of the project
2. Explicit risks:external risks related to specific deliverable (or group of deliverables), resources, or stakeholders.

Scope Management Failure 

Scope failure is one of the biggest challenges for project managers, especially in large and complex projects. As PMI’s 2020 survey reveals, 52% of projects experience scope challenges.

The solution is to strengthen your scope management approach. Develop a uniform, scalable process to document, investigate and execute changes.

Some steps you can take are:

• Get project sponsors involved in the scope planning process. It’s better to know exactly what you have to build at the start of the project than at the very end.
• Use the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) as a guideline for planning project scope. This gives you a better idea of what you have to build.
• Create a change management process that focuses on documenting all change requests in a central library. You can then prioritize each request based on urgency and impact. You should also have a way to track any action or communication related to the change request.
• Invest in better monitoring. If you have all your project data in a centralized dashboard, it will be easier to spot projects growing beyond the scope and take remedial measures early.

Poor Collaboration

We all know this for a fact, not only in business and project management: poor communication and misunderstandings can lead to disastrous results. Without having constant communication channels where team members can outline their ideas, raise issues and provide their comments, it’s very likely that the project will come across challenges that will fly under the radar.

This topic is especially important in today’s remote working environments. If you’re running a project that’s fully remote (all sections: sales, marketing, IT, design, product and project management), you have to make sure that the communication channels will suffice and enable a successful outcome of the project.

Conclusion

If you’re constantly educating yourself as a businessperson, you don’t have to go through trial-and-error processes with your company: you can also learn from other business’ mistakes and apply the lessons to your own.

Unfortunately, we have many cases of project management fails that led to poor results or a total crash of the project.