The Top 10 Reasons for Project Failure by Anticlue

Let's be frank, we, project managers, are fascinated by project failure. Mostly, due to the fact that we do not want our projects to fail, so how to avoid project failure will be forthcoming In my experience, I have comprised a listing of the top 10 reasons for project failure. Please feel free to suggest additional reasons or share your experiences. Its great to hear from you, without further ado.

10 Most Common Reasons for Project Failure

1. No Connection between the project's outcome and the organization's strategic or tactical priorities - When looking at what the business was trying to achieve with this project, it turns out to be a pet project which doesn't help to achieve the organization's strategic plan or even tactical priorities
2. Bad Project Sponsorship - The project sponsor has a close relationship with everything but this project. The project sponsor won't touch or talk about the project with you.
3. Missing in Action Project Champion/Advocate at the Senior Leadership Team- It becomes obvious after a leadership renewal or before that process, the only advocate for your project is a supervisor several levels down on the management hierarchy. No one in the senior leadership team understands the benefits to the organization of this project.
4. Ineffective StakeHolder Engagement - For these projects the impact to the stakeholders is right below everything else. There is no consideration to stakeholder buy-in or engagement in the project plan. When speaking of the Change Transformation Framework, you glance over significant blank stares.
5. Poor Project Management - There is a lack of sophisticated project management. Executives mistakenly believe project managers are just glorified documenters.
6. Worthless Risk Management- When bringing up a Risk Identification session to your sponsor and management, you hear the comment why would we want to talk about what bad things could happen?
7. Large Work Tasks- In reviewing the project schedule, you notice that most of your work tasks are above a week, sometimes even a month in deliverable time.
8. Penny Smart Proposal Review - Save Money, Doesn't matter how much it costs later. This comes up at the most convenient I beg your pardon moments. In reviewing the contract, you notice that your financially stable organization has leased equipment for purchase at 15% rate, or perhaps we are delaying on boarding those critical staff members, to save a bit of money right now - never mind there is no one to do the work.
9. Non-existent team between the customer, it, vendor - When you talk about a performing team including the customer, it, vendor you wonder why you can never ever get any two of the three parties in the same room or conference call.
10. Poor vendor governance - In discussing vendor management and governance, the item is why do we need to setup this relationship, it is just so much better to blame it on the vendor when everything heads south

If you enjoyed this post, you may want to also consider reading:

• Top Ten Signs your IT Organization is Misaligned


• The Top 5 Reasons PMOs Fail


• Three Levels of IT Leadership Based Upon Organization Sophistication

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