Rules For Addressing And Preventing The Project From Failure

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Communication is the most important factor in success or failure of any project. One of the issues faced by project manager is often being handed a project with a scope of work that does not contain a clearly defined purpose or expected end results, and a definition of the acceptance criteria for project completion. This relates back to the rule of communication, but too often newer project managers make the assumption that the stakeholder providing them with the scope wants a successful outcome; therefore, the scope must certainly provide all of the details relevant to achieving success. This is often worsened multiplicatively when the project has already been begun poorly by someone else and a Project Manager is expected to accept responsibility for fixing the problem and carrying the balance to successful outcome. You can double your project success rate by moving to an agile practice.

The simplicity of implementing scrum masks the complex heavy-lifting that never gets done inside organizations on their journey to transformation. Agile implementation is a “real” change of mindsets, which takes a lot more than implementing few practices. Implementing any type of change inside organizations is hard and thankless work and can be exhausting and downright overwhelming. There are no short cuts. Words and sayings, however, are attractive because they are designed to implicitly allow otherwise smart people to ignore reality and engage in wishful thinking. They, unfortunately, also lead people into false beliefs, unproductive decisions, and prevent them from doing the work that needs to be done.

Recommended approach to properly address a project failure would be to evaluate what went wrong with the project and complete a root cause analysis of the failure. This process should provide additional information to be used when communicating with all stakeholders. The communication to those involved in the project must include appropriate details of mistakes discovered during the investigation to prevent them from happening again. Make sure the findings and actions taken are properly documented in the project for future reference. So often team members are so happy it is over, that they do not want to go back. And if they do, the meetings are not well received and there is very little chatter. They fail to see the value of reliving their nightmare and attempting to learn from it. Is this just this particular environment or is this the norm?

The key is to identify risk as early as possible and develop a plan with the team that is presented to the stakeholders. If the risk materializes then you have a plan to act on which will benefit the project and increase your reputation. In terms of risks to be managed, a project manager frequently does not have the knowledge or skill to determine what constitutes a risk for all possible risks. This also requires communication “soft-skills” to gain feedback from all relevant stakeholders to a project, throughout the project life-cycle, to continually be aware of all risks, both identified and new.
Likewise, if a project manager is waiting until the end of a project to draw out the “lessons learned” from project team members the less experienced project manager will find they come up with little or nothing to document. In terms of the “what went well” and “what needs improvement” the realized risks (issues) should be a big clue to the improvement areas. All of this also leads right back to communicating effectively throughout the life of the project to a wide range of stakeholders. Thorough planning with the right stakeholders, functional managers and team members is essential to clearly identify the project objective, measures, exclusions, risks, roles & responsibilities, thereby reducing project failure.

About Aditi Malhotra

Aditi Malhotra is the Content Marketing Manager at Whizlabs. Having a Master in Journalism and Mass Communication, she helps businesses stop playing around with Content Marketing and start seeing tangible ROI. A writer by day and a reader by night, she is a fine blend of both reality and fantasy. Apart from her professional commitments, she is also endearing to publish a book authored by her very soon.

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