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11 Signs That Your Project Will Fail - Part I

March 16, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Miscellaneous

11 Signs That Your Project Will Fail - Part I (#1 in the series 11 Signs That Your Project Will Fail)
By Satya Narayan Dash

Over 50% of IT projects fail. Most of the time, there are a number of early signs that the project will fail. We will discuss some of the symptoms for a project doomed to fail.

Though the concepts here are in more in sync with IT projects, the applicability of them is universal.

Here are the top 11 symptoms1:

1. No Project Charter

I have seen Project Managers not being demanding on the Project Charter. In fact, very few Project Managers actually consider it seriously. The Charter is the Bible for your project and it is the only document which officially recognizes a project, and hence brings in the funding.

Never start a project without a Project Charter. The Project Charter is the piece of document which formally and officially authorizes a project.

2. Lack of Senior Management Involvement

If the senior management is not involved in the project, then who will support it? What will you do if there are issues with respect to resources, budget, time, etc…

Here are some of the things to note:

  • Are the decision makers involved in Status meetings?
  • Is accountability demanded for results?
  • Can the get the decisions be made?

The senior management along with sponsor and customer form an important triangle of stakeholders. The sponsor and customers are critical during the early and final phases of your project, it is the senior management who periodically supports the incubation and growth of the project.

3. Inexperienced or Ego-driven Project Managers

There are many project managers who have no formal training on project management, from globally recognized programs. Also, there are many experienced, but ego comes in the way of gaining knowledge.

In today’s world where change is the only constant, having better methodologies, novel practices, using new analytical approach not only helps in salvaging a project, but also helps in a better return on investment.

4. Over-Allocated Key Team Members

When the Key team members or the Subject Matter experts are over scheduled, then they will have no time to look back or take notice. It is a sign that burn-out is going to happen for them and of course, the crash of your project.

5. No Risk Management Plan

Risks should be defined very early in a project. They may be “known-known” or “unknown-unknown”, etc…, and there should be a risk management plan for every project.

A critical but unidentified risk has the ability to stretch the scope of the project and hence time and cost. Though you may deliver the project, it will not be considered a success as the symbiotic relationship between the triple constraints has been violated.

1The other 6 will follow in the next article

Satya Narayan Dash is the Principal Consultant and Founder of Teleox® Consulting, Bangalore, India. Prior to that, he was Project Leader with Wipro® Technologies and a Project Leader with AdventNet®, Inc. He has rich experience of 8+ years in product development, and architecture in Java® and J2EE® based Telecom solutions. As a certified Project Management Professional (PMP®) from Project Management Institute (PMI®) and MS Project 2007®, he has trained hundreds of project managers and consultants. He holds a Bachelor Degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar, India. He can be contacted at email: ndsatya@gmail.com

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 people have left comments

Great post. The one I see most often is, “Over-Allocated Key Team Members” with “Lack of Senior Management Involvement”; though I would call it lack of business sponsorship. I have observed many projects being run completely by the technology team only to fail to deliver what the business wanted, but then again they never spent any time after making the request.

Look forward to the next six.

Jeffrey wrote on March 16, 2009 - 8:15 am | Visit Link

Thanks Jeffrey. I could not agree more coming from a technical background, I know how painful it is for the team of developers when the project goes away by mismanagement.

The pain, agony or the ecstasy and pleasure of a developer in bringing a product to life can only be shared by someone who has gone through the same highs and lows. Here is one from Joel, an Ex-Program Manager at Microsoft: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/03/09.html

“It helps, as a program manager, to be pretty good at coding yourself. This is unfair. Program managers aren’t supposed to write code. But programmers tend to respect programmers a lot more than non-programmers, no matter how smart they are. It is possible to be an effective program manager without being a coder, but the burden of earning the respect of the programming team will be higher.”

But, in the real world, we see a lot of people in management role, who have no idea on how technology works. I do not expect them to code, but they even do not know the ecosystem they live in! And they go with the principle - “Either my way or the highway!” Some even worse - follow the Caligula Principle - “They can hate me as long as they fear me” (after all they are the managers even though they do not know the technology!)

Satya wrote on March 16, 2009 - 11:15 am | Visit Link

Hey Satya. As an SME and Tech Lead, I think you have hit the nail on the head with your point on “Over-Allocated Key Team Members”. This unfortunately is often combined with the problem of “Inexperienced Project Managers”.

I see this on a daily basis whereby the PM is out of their depth and they end up putting all the pressure on the Tech Lead to make up for their lack of knowledge or leadership.

Eventually the Tech Lead drowns in documentation and issues that a decent PM would never allow happen. Come deployment/launch date, if your Tech Lead is not extremely pedantic and anal, then there are going to be production issues.

Looking forward to the next article…

Eoin Redmond wrote on March 19, 2009 - 6:08 am | Visit Link

Thanks Eoin for your comments.

As Larry Elision of Oracle recently put it - the “yo-yo” years of IT is coming to an end. The actual boom happened during the internet birth, when anyone who could spell Java or C++ or C, with some experiences from any industry got into management roles.

May be the next phase will see techno managers with solid managerial as well as technical capability - after the recession.

Satya wrote on March 20, 2009 - 7:13 am | Visit Link

[...] 11 Signs That Your Project Will Fail - Part II [...]

11 Signs That Your Project Will Fail - Part II - PM Hut wrote on March 22, 2009 - 11:47 pm | Visit Link

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