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.

While most of professional will consider the project a failure if it is not simply meeting the holy triple constraint (time, cost, quality), that is not the case with 21st century projects, it is not just about the triple constraint, it is about the value the project delivers by managing the triple constraint, the project manager is absolutely the first responsible to the triple constraint, and when things go wrong, project manager is the first one to explain why the project is not on track, however sometimes it is not fair to put all the blame only on the project manager, especially today’s projects are quite complicated and involve all types of stakeholders, but that is why project management is very important today, to find someone who will always be asked about the project outcome.

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Every year zillions of dollars are getting wasted because of failed projects, and despite all the efforts to make projects succeed, projects still fail, I do believe that project managers’ role is more important than ever, although the number of projects has decreased due to financial crisis, yet with the recession project managers are now more valuable than ever, as the tolerance of failure is almost zero, no customer in today’s economy expects to have a failed project, and so the biggest factor to have a successful project is project management.

When I first started to think about this post, I launched my favourite mind mapping tool (Xmind) and selected a Fishbone diagram, then I started to brainstorm all the potential reasons for a project to fail, I could identify 11 categories to start with, then I started to nail down reasons for each and every category, until I dumped all the reasons in my mind, the reasons I could identify are based on my experience, and my fellow project managers. The reasons are targeting IT projects, however all those reasons can be also applied to non-IT projects, I intend to write a separate post for each root cause category, below is a screenshot of the mind map

In the next post I will start by the first category “Initiating”, your feedback is highly appreciated, please share your experience with project failure, also feel free to leave a comment, tweet, digg, and share the post!