In the current issue of PMForum there is a discussion of the failures of Project Management to deliver on its promises. There are three points made about the failure of project management:
- Claims don't match the observed results
- The pro duct does not address the need
- Bureaucracy is substituted for results
One place to start is to ask why a project doesn't have answers to the following:
- What are we building?
- Who is building it?
- What does done look like?
- How much does it cost?
- What is the target completion date?
- How do we measure progress?
- Where are we building it?
- Who is going to buy?
In the absence of answers to these questions (and similar ones) it's no wonder project management fails to deliver on its promises. Forget the processes of PM, simple questions and answer asked by any viable business development person need to be in place before any processes can be discussed.
The focus on Project Management process improvement is a solution looking for a problem. If PM's continue with this approach then we'll also continue to have a second order impact on the outcomes.
The basic root cause analysis of project failure has a variety of reasons. A quick Google search on the phrase "why projects fail," comes up with about 19,000 hits. Care must be taken though to look at "reasons" from actual field studies, not from firms selling solutions to project failure problems. The referenced Chaos report is one those measurements that has flawed statistics, since there is no public definition of "failure." But Crosstalk, Capers Jones, many Defense and Civil agency reports have real field data. The primary cause across these studies includes:
- Poor requirements
- Stakeholder conflicts
- Poor cost and schedule estimation
- Failure to plan
- Poor architecture
- Late failure warning indicators
There are others of course, but until Project Management directly addresses these (and other) issues with actionable outcomes rather than broad generalities, it will be relegated to tactical position rather than strategic process.
