While Scope Creep and Gold Plating may appear as two different issues in project management, they are relevant and very likely to result in unsatisfied customers, the creep term is so true, you start a small change and accept it without enough analysis then you find yourself doing another change in order to implement the first one, and creep keeps going and going!

Are you furious about high rates of failing projects? does it bother you? project failure has been a hot topic for many years, companies and countries lose billions every year because of projects failure, look around you will find many stumbling projects, if you are unhappy about project failure, stop talking and start acting, we need to help out first time project managers and so this is a little initiative that hopefully can make a change!

Do you always say YES? It’s time to say NO! many project mangers intentionally play this role of a doormat, they mistakenly think it would make them successful or at least get seen as obedient and trying to always please each and every stakeholder, being a doormat destroys the professional image of the project manager it also exhibits some stereotypes of project failure

In part four of Why Projects Fail series, we will examine the procurement root cause and see how it can cause the project failure, procurement involves establishing a relationship with a vendor to build the project’s deliverables, if a wrong vendor is selected, the entire project will be threatened, the project manager has to have robust knowledge and vast experience with the procurement process, in this post I will discuss procurement mistakes and how to avoid them.

If you work on IT projects and have not heard about Marketecture before this is a must read for you, Marketecture (Marketing Architecture) is a very common technique that most of vendors use to market and sell their products, in Marketecture, marketing people use the architectural advantages of a product to tout it and influence the client’s decision to buy the product, often times Marketecture is planned in the very early stages of the product planning and prior to the product build, as a project manager you have to protect your project from Marketecture, read on to know how Marketecture works and what precautions you can take to avoid falling in the Marketecture trap.

In part three we will examine a very interesting root cause which will make a lot of people scratch their heads, it is Project Manager, yes the project manager is one of the root causes why projects fail, while from the first look this may seem awkward as so many people will simply say that projects fail when there is no project manager, however in my humble opinion a considerable percentage of projects fail because of poor project management, let’s see the sub causes.