Guide 12 The Five Top Reasons That Projects Go Wrong

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Guide 12 The Five Top Reasons That Projects Go Wrong

What's this Guide about?

This Guide describes the reasons that the vast majority of projects go wrong. Five possible causes are given. While there are others, these causes account for the vast majority of failed or troubled projects. If you are running a project you want to make sure you’re not guilty of any of these.

How is the Guide structured?

There are five sections, one for each cause. The cause is stated and then the cure is given. In some cases the cure refers to a previous Guide.

1 Cause #1 – The project was never possible in the first place

The Cause
This is probably the single biggest reason why projects fail. Somebody says, ‘Here’s the project, we don’t know much about it, but it has to be done by this date for this budget with these resources’ and everybody says, ‘OK’. This is as true for large projects as it is for those seemingly trivial requests. If you’ve ever had the experience of somebody saying, ‘This won’t take you very long’ and four years later you’re still working on it, then you’ll have experienced this.

This can mean that the project is doomed within minutes / hours of having been born.

The Cure
The cure for this is incredibly simple. Whenever you are asked to do anything – large project or seemingly trivial request – say, ‘I’ll take a look at it’. Don’t agree to anything, just say, ‘I’ll take a look at it’.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• What's this Guide about?
• How is the Guide structured?
• Cause #1 The project was never possible in the first place
• Cause #2 The goal of the project wasn’t bounded
• Cause #3 There was no change control on the project
• Cause #4 Failure to identify project stakeholders or stakeholders’ win-conditions
• Cause #5 The project wasn’t estimated properly
  
  

What you get

• The Guide itself