A report from the Center for Business Practices, "Troubled projects: project failure or project recovery (2006)," describes the reasons for projects getting into trouble.
- Expectations that are too high, unrealistic, not managed, or poorly communicated. The needed capabilities were not defined in any meaningful way. The missing element was a clear and concise description of the concept of operations. Even in the absence of this, some form of developing this description in an emerging environment was missing.
- Requirements that are unclear, contradictory, ambiguous, or imprecise; or there is a lack of agreement on these requirements. If you don't control the requirements, the project is lost. No matter what anyone says about emergence or what ever "magic beans," controlling the scope of the projects is a critical success factor.
- A lack of resources, resource conflicts, turnover of key resources, or poor resource planning. A resource plan is just a critical as a test plan.
- Planning that is based on insufficient data, missing items, insufficient details, or poor estimates. Bad data means bad decisions.
These are all common reasons described in the report, along with detection criteria, and other common symptoms. The report goes on to describe some methods for "recovering" the project.
But what happened to get the project in the "troubled state" in the first place? The report suggested that Project Controls were missing, along with some other parts. But the lack of project controls is a common cause of most project failures.
What does it mean to have "Controls" in place for a project? Controls that can keep the project out of Trouble in the first place?
- Financial performance is visible. This is done through Cost Management and Schedule Management controls. No one works on anything that doesn't have a budget, control account and some kind of cost tracking.
- Scope changes are managed, not just controlled. All cost, schedule, risk, and beneficial outcomes of the requested scope change are made through a "change control" process.
- The planned and actual work effort is visible. While work effort does not mean physical progress, in most project the labor costs account for the majority of the project cost.
- Physical Percent Complete is visible. This means defining the planned incremental progress of the project in some unit of measure meaningful to the participants. Then measuring the progress in ways that assure physical percent complete toward to the goal is being made.
- Quality of the products or services meets the planned levels for the specific phase of the project.
- Maintaining a satisfactory customer perception of the project. This means "keeping the project sold." It is the basis of Customer Satisfaction.
