I’ve been looking at the remediation activities that I have recently been involved in and started to gather some strong evidence as to that sort of things that clearly add to project failure. Here I will capture a few of them.
1. Business processes aren’t fully understood before starting
So many times in the past few months I have found that business area’s do not have process maps, clearly showing their processes. Why is this important to the projects that they are undertaking? Because in order to make any changes within the business you are highly likely to impact at least one, if not more, business processes, therefore by not understanding the AS IS state; what the process currently looks like, you have no basis to start your project work around. This makes it harder to define your requirements for change; You have no way of understanding how much of an impact the future state is going to have on you, therefore how can you possibly understand the benefits of what you are doing on your project?; You will find it hard to articulate exactly what is and isn’t in scope for your project.
2. Scope isn’t clearly locked down before starting, and isn’t monitored during the life of the project
And, by really clearly locked down I mean documented in such a way that ALL people working on the project really understand what is and isn’t in scope. For the project manager it makes it much easier to manage the project, from all fronts because they are able to see what it is that they do and don’t need to be achieving. Planning becomes easier; answering questions or issues that arise is easier; reporting on progress is cleaner; and you can ask for funds and know that you won’t be blowing them, because any changes would need to be clearly defined as change requests with additional funding requested.
3. Project planning is incomplete or not done honestly
It’s nice to want to deliver the project for your sponsor in the shortest amount of time, but what is going to make him/her more happy – a project that is delivered on time, or one that goes over because you didn’t plan your resourcing requirements properly. Fully understanding your resource constraints is imperative to project success. You must plan factoring in BAU activities for your resources, where they are shared. Additional time must also be factored in for down time through holidays and illness – these are things that happen in any business and it is silly NOT to factor some time in for these.
You MUST create a project plan, something that is visible to the whole team, and your PCB so that everyone is accountable for the work that they need to do. Without this, you are certainly not going to be able to track deliverables easily, nor report to your PCB on your progress – not in a way that is truthful and open.
4. The right information is not gathered prior to starting
What do I mean by this? If you have completed your process mapping as discussed in point 1 then there is additional information that will drop out of these and what it is that you are changing in delivering your project. You will find that questions will be raised, which might not have been covered in your business requirements. You will see that you need additional and specialist skills in order to make changes, or gather data, etc. You might find that you need to rework the Business Requirements, or that perhaps there are different solutions that need to be revisited and reconsidered. Going into a project with very basic information gathered creates a nightmare, that impacts everyone in and around the project.
5. Stakeholders are not engaged soon enough
Stakeholders, those important people that are sometimes also called SME’s (Subject Matter Experts); business groups impacted by the change; process owners, just to name a few. By not engaging these people early enough in your project you are causing yourself no end of trouble. One of them might hold the key to a very important piece of information which could completely change the requirements for your project; or worse still could be the owners of a system that is fully impacted by your project (and you don’t know it) meaning that unless you have their support and buy-in what you are working towards delivering is useless – because it can’t be used. Do your homework, ask the questions, ensure that you have connected with your stakeholders BEFORE you get too far into your project.
If you pay attention to these five reasons and rectify them you will be well on the way to ensuring project success.