Will We Ever Learn from Project Failure?
Will We Ever Learn from Project Failure?
By John Lawlor
Anyone involved in IT project management will probably have had the misfortune to have been involved in or to have known a project that failed. Careers can be destroyed; recriminations fly; blame is apportioned by everyone to everyone else; relationships break down; trust is damaged, and people who were friends become strangers. That’s the human side, which is often ignored in the dynamics of projects.
On the project side, the causes of failure are fairly well known and include, in no particular order:
- Bad project management
- Poor budget management
- Bad requirements
- Inappropriate technology selection
- Lack of clarity on expected outcomes and benefits
- No testing or inadequate testing
- Bad or no quality management
- Bad or no risk management
- Poor scope management leading to scope creep
- Lack of change management
- Lack of top management commitment
- Failure to consult appropriate stakeholders
- Bad communications
- Poor team working
- Inadequate resources, both people and budget
- Resistance to change
- Diverging objectives
- Changes in the underlying business or wider environment
- Poor vendor performance
- and many more
Please don’t criticise me unduly me if I have omitted some causes, or elevated others incorrectly to the short list!! If you’d like to be more precise than me, I’m sure you can get the latest thinking on project failure from Gartner, IDC, OVUM, Forrester, Standish Group, Big 4, Government Audit (C&AG in Ireland) and many more, and I bet all of them will include some or all of what I have listed above. Study after study, and consulting assignment after consulting assignment, will regularly point to these causes of project failure.
So if organisations know the human reasons for failure; and they know the project reasons for failure, and they know the technical reasons for failure (and these are already well documented in the literature); and they continue to allow projects to fail, then my question is not, ‘Why do projects fail?’, it is this:
‘Why do organisations not learn from project failure?’
I will suggest my own answers to this question in a subsequent article; but, in the meantime, I would like to hear what you think.
What are your views on this question? What experiences have you had that might point to the inability of organisations to learn from project failure? Have you been involved in projects that you knew would fail, yet still carried on until the inevitable collapse? Why do organisations not understand or accept what is staring them plainly in the face?
John Lawlor is an IT manager and consultant and has been delivering large-scale technology and business solutions in major public and private sector organisations for over 25 years. He is the author and presenter of training courses on general management; strategic management; project management; communications skills and personal development. He speaks regularly at seminars on public sector governance; internal audit; public financial management and value for money. He also writes on technology, business and career matters. John Lawlor can be contacted through his blog, http://johnlawlor.ie/‘.
Hi John,
Thanks for starting the discussion. Without doubt, organizations learn from failures. The question is what they learn from mistakes and how valuable is that to improving project management. My experience tells me that the only thing organizations learn from failed projects are some possible causes of failures. Organizations cannot learn from failures how to run projects successfully. I have talked about this in one of recent posts on my blog. Let’s discuss this using an example.
Your post mentions bad communication as one of possible causes of a failure. Learning that a project failed because of bad communication does not tell organization what level of communication has to be done in a project to ensure its success. In one project, the reason is too little communication. The organization may try to require more communication. Too much communication may result in another failure. Some projects may never report status and progress to stakeholders and sponsors and they are going to fail because of that. Some projects may over communicate status and progress and fail because of that. Bottom line, analyzing how bad communication contributes to failed projects does not help organization to learn what level and process for communication leads to success.
This example just showcases my believe that organizations should shift their focus from analyzing failed projects to deeply studying projects that succeeded. If there was any project that demonstrated good level of communication, organization should carefully study communication management in that project, note what went well and repeat it. Overall organizations should decompose any successful project, find what worked well and use that in other projects. What worked well in one project in this organization is likely to work well in another projects. Organizations should focus on building lists of best practices with detailed studies that show why these practices work. They should teach best practices to everyone within the organization. Any method in which an organization can leverage reasons for success in new projects learned from past projects helps such organization to improve project management.
Cheers,
Nick
Good day,
They are absolutely happy with what they have than “fly to others they know not of.”
Stay well.
A. T.
The reason is that project managers don’t known how to apply patterns on real world…