Project Failures: The Top 9 and The Key Steps to Avoid Them

How to Use Project Failures to Your Advantage
Avoiding or postponing feedback after projects failures is like closing the door on your own chance to learn — foregoing the first step out of the basement of defeat toward the clarity, insight, and continuous improvement that follow. Our latest project postmortem survey shows that the majority of project failures can be traced back to an unclear or poorly defined project initiation phase.

The Top Nine Project Failures Related to Project Definition
Do any of these top nine project definition mistakes sound familiar?

1. Business Case
   The business case for change and rationale for the project was vague, tactical, debatable, misaligned, not committed to, or created in a vacuum.
2. Goals
   Ambiguities in team goals and accountabilities created confusion among customers, management, project managers, and the project team about what needed to be achieved and why.
3. Metrics
   While people generally knew what success would be, it was unclear how the success of the project was ultimately to be measured.
4. Statement of Work
   Project deliverables, scope, approach, assumptions, timing, or budget were not formalized or fully agreed to by all key stakeholders.
5. Stakeholders
   It was unclear who the internal and external project stakeholders were, what they cared most about, and who mattered most to project success.
6. Roles
   Project team members and stakeholders’ roles and responsibilities were unclear, confusing, or shifting without explicit re-calibration.
7. Sponsor
   Formal and authoritative sponsorship of the project was unclear or in name only.
8. Resources
   There were not enough resources to meet key project objectives within the identified project time, quality, and cost parameters.
9. Communication
   While communication occurred, there was no formal strategy or plan to ensure that information got to the right people the right information at the right time in the right way.

How to Avoid Project Failures In the Future
To avoid project failures in the future:

• Make It Psychologically Safe to Talk about Project Failure Openly
  Encourage every project team member to share their observations on what went wrong. Approaching the conversation with curiosity, humility, and even a touch of humor helps create a safe environment where team members feel comfortable speaking openly and honestly.
• Don’t Seek to Assign Blame
  At this stage, “who” is less important than understanding “what” went wrong, “why,” and how it can be prevented in the future. Keep the discussion impersonal—focus on learning and improving processes rather than assigning blame.
• Focus on Continuous Improvement
  Guide your team to view project failure as a real-time learning resource — an opportunity to design future projects that are faster, smarter, and more cost-effective.

The Bottom Line
To prevent future project failures, ensure your teams have the skills, support, and knowledge needed to define the project correctly from the start. Invest the time upfront to get the business case, goals, metrics, statement of work, stakeholders, roles, sponsors, resources, and communication plan “right enough” before moving into execution.

Want to learn more about successfully leading project teams?  Download 5 Steps to Get Your Project Team Pulling in the Same Direction to help avoid project failures.