How to prevent project failures

Introduction

Many scholars write documents of project failures and they claim that many projects fail either totally or partially, be it in engineering or in software engineering (Morris, 1998). Digging into the roots of project failure is very imperative in improving our project performance. If we do not put effort into investigating the causes of the failures, we will never make any progress. Project failure is very expensive, embarrassing and it is something that is alarmingly common (Betterprojects.net, 2014). It is a problem that is occurring in every industry and every country. In many cases, the cause of project failure is not technical; it is often managerial (Sauser et al., 2009). The paper investigates the root causes of project failure.

1. Poor estimates in the planning phase

Estimates are one of the persistence challenges to project management. The reason is that all projects entail making of transitions and creating something new whether it did not exist or it is an improvement on what is already there. The poor estimates in the planning phase continue to be the largest causative agent for poor performance of projects and it the single worsening trend (Sandboxmodel.com, 2013). It is common place that projects have a budget and the deadline that they ought to meet before the business requirements has completion. Many times because proper definition does not take place, and they do not occur ahead of time, project teams start off with inadequate resources and time. Worse still, the project team does not realize it until when the project is already progressing and in that time it is costly to go back and make changes in the estimates.

Many projects that happen to be successful have a view as failures by reason of their over shortage in their budgets and deadlines. Project managers are to blame for this outcome because they commit themselves to figures that are too low in light of their lack of upfront planning. Some projects teams even do not do the estimates. They just go forward, planning to report their success when they complete their work (Galorath.com, 2015). Some other teams just proceed with the project based on simple estimation, thinking that they can fix the flaws that may arise anytime during the project progress. We should understand that when the estimates are bad, the associated plans are vulnerable to doom right from the start. That makes meeting of expectations impossible, taking of shortcuts in an attempt to make up the time, and consequently the projects suffer cancelation as loss of business value occurs.

2. Inadequate focus on QA and testing

There is no discussing of quality requirements before projects commence therefore allowing different individuals to have different expectations and achievable standards (Calleam.com, 2015). They do not plan into project appropriate reviews, tests or checkpoints at which they can check the quality. They may also be viewing quality in terms of testing rather than a working culture. Because of the lack of concrete quality standards guidelines, their reviews of documents and the design papers normally focus on spelling and grammar and not on substantive issues. Others view quality as the responsibility of the quality assurance team rather than seeing it as a shared responsibility. They take it with the mentality of "Throw it over the wall" and the team that is responsible for developing the project deliverables does not even care about the quality of the deliverables.

Quality, as viewed by the team members, is simply the testing of individual components created in the project, and that should occur at the end of the project. They leave the integration and testing of the individual components of the projects to all development activities’ completion. They do not focus on carrying out incremental integration and the verification in finding and fixing of flaws early enough in the project progress. Skipping certain types of testing and proceeding to user acceptance testing also can serve as a recipe for failure (Madsen, 2011). Also, carrying out tests in a test environment that has a different configuration from the target production or operation environment where projects will be usable leads to failure.

3. Stakeholder engagement issues

Failure to identify and establish proper engagement of the necessary stakeholders may automatically lead to project failure. The stakeholders are people who provide key inputs to critical decisions made in the project. Their involvement is indispensable. Identifying stakeholders in relation to their interests, power and their attitudes aids in bringing the most salient stakeholders into the process of decision-making (Bal, et al., 2013). Because of the lack project teams to engage the stakeholders in the project, they fail to view the project from the eyes of the stakeholders. That leads to failure as the teams may not appreciate how the project will impact the stakeholders and how they will react towards the same. Some project teams may also impose a solution or a decision on the stakeholders and consequently fail to get a buy-in.

The project’s steering committee has a responsibility for executive decision-making as well as offering high-level direction. The project team escalates issues that they cannot deal with on their own to this committee (Madsen, 2011). If this group fails to support the project, fails to accept ownership and responsibility or they disregard allocating their energy to the project, the project will suffer. The stakeholders also are responsible for providing the initial and successive input into the project charter. Failure of stakeholder involvement from the beginning means that there will a poorly designed or non-existent project charter which leads to continuous revamping of the project. That will lead to delays and continuous rework and might often end up causing the project slippage or outright failure.

Conclusion

Project failures entail many things a few of which I discussed above. If the project teams identify the root causes of failure, it is possible to curtail project failure. The agents need identification and forthwith arrest right from the beginning or at least whenever they occur. Identification of the problem is one thing and providing a solution is another. Therefore, the proper identification of causes of project failure should take place, and the right solutions for mitigating them should then follow. If organizations can arrest these causes of failure, they will save a lot of funds that could result in the failures. That is because normally organizations pump a lot of resources and finances into projects and curing is more expensive than prevention. The factors mentioned above of project failure are only a few of the many causes, and the way to go depends on the organization strategies and the type of cause.

References

Betterprojects.net (2014).How to prevent project failure in 2014.

Morris, P. (1998). ‘Key issues in project management,’ Project management handbook (J. Pinto ed.), 3-26. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Sauser, B. et al. (2009): Why projects fail? How contingency theory can provide new insights – A comparative analysis of NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter loss. International journal of project management,27(2009): 665-679.

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