Project failure is more common than we would like to think. In spite of careful planning, strong management support and a team’s best efforts projects come in overdue, over budget and outside of scope.
While project failure is uncomfortably frequent, it is not inevitable. Once teams identify the common causes of project failure, they can correct them and increase the odds of a project’s success.
Consider four common causes of project failure and their solutions.
Ineffective Communication — Life is hard for the team that doesn’t communicate well. Poor communication confuses team members, erodes team cohesion, obscures the big picture and causes important tasks to be overlooked or completed incorrectly.
Solution: Frequency and clarity are two important factors in effective communication. Teams can improve the frequency of communication by adapting software that allows them to collaborate.
Increase clarity by requiring team members to eliminate industry jargon from team communication. Not all team members have the same background and understanding of the process. Face-to face meetings can help team members overcome communication gaps that phone calls and emails can’t.
Unchecked Scope Creep — Scope creep can be deadly to a project. Making additions, changes, or updates to a project, even small ones, after it has already commenced can cause a project to bog down or even derail completely. The question is: How can a team meet the changing demands of stakeholders, leadership and customers without drastically altering the direction of the project?
Solution: It helps to take a page from the Six Sigma playbook and create a project charter before work gets underway. This charter clearly defines the scope of the project and obtains the blessing of management before the team goes to work. The project charter requires management to justify changes to project scope, and prevents them from making scope changes on a whim.
Vague Objectives — Even the most talented project teams are doomed to frustration and poor results if they don’t clearly understand the problem they are trying to solve. Any solution they recommend will at best solve only part of the problem.
Solution: Make sure the problem is clearly understood by going beyond just stating what you think it is. Put the clarity of your understanding to the test by writing a business case that justifies the project need and estimates the project’s financial benefits. Exploring the project in greater detail provides a better understanding of the problem.
Fear of Failure — Even well-planned projects with strong leadership and talented team members fail, at least in the short term, but some will handle failure better than others. Some fall apart, look for someone to blame, and give in to defeat.
Solution: Successful teams that encounter failure see it as a learning opportunity not the end of the road. They ask better questions: Where did our plan go wrong? What can we do differently in the future? As a result they get better answers that put them back on track.
Don’t be surprised if you temporarily fail on your next project. Look for the most likely causes, make the changes that you need to and don’t repeat your mistakes.
Knowing the obstacles your project will face and knowing how to solve them helps your team safeguard the project from failure.
