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.

Initiating is one of the most overlooked phases of a project lifecycle (so as is Closing), you have to keep in my mind that if you start wrong, chances are you will end wrong, just like a building’s foundation, if the foundation is not solid the building may collapse any time before or after completing the building, same thing applies to any project, the problem with initiating phase is that it is mostly handled without the project manager, most of project sponsor start appointing a project manager only when the project is approved and after the business case, if there is any, has been built.

If you google “why projects fail” you will get about 10 million results, which implies an undeniable fact, that is projects do fail, as per the study conducted by the Standish group (2004 edition), 18% of projects are considered failed (cancelled before completion), 53% of projects have been tagged as “challenged” (over budget and/or overtime and/or not meeting quality requirements), typically 43% of projects are delivered over budget and 82% exhibit schedule slippage.