10 Reasons for Project Failure - Part 1 of 2

In this podcast, Ricardo talks about the 10 main causes of project failure. Just knowing what can go wrong in our project, helps us to avoid it. Five causes are discussed this week and the other five, next week. Ricardo also comments briefly on the PMI Pulse 2012, recently published by PMI.

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Episode transcript

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Hello everybody welcome to the five Minutes PM podcast today. I like to share with you the Project Failure Reasons and why it's very important to understand why one project fails. Because if we know the roots, if we know the Reasons of the Failure, we can prevent them to happen. They are so easy to be perceived as it and not so easy to be fixed it, but In this podcast next week Podcast or want to share with you the top 10 reasons in my beliefs, and also in most of the project, senior project managers, they believe in the same.

And I'd like to start talking about the first one. It's the lack of understanding the project scope. So for me, this is one of the most important that people start doing projects without understanding what is the scope of the project, what work should be done. And it's really, really important to make sure before you work with time before we work with cost, you need to understand what this project needs to do. We need to understand that because this will drive us to the second reason of failure is the scope creep.

And this two Reasons are pretty much related because if I don't understand what is the work that I need to do to produce the product and the services, it's very, very common that the school of this work in Greece, because there is no boundary, there is no clear boundary in water in and water is out of the project. So your project to start to become a monster, you start to what is inside all possible work.

But the problem is that this is not change management. I'm not talking about change management. I'm talking about scope creep. The time it remains the same, the cost remains the same, but the work at the, your customer, your client request more, more and more. And because you don't have of clear, pro's at scope, it's very hard for you to set up this front a year off of what is inside and what is outside. The third one that I wanted to share with you is the lack of sponsorship.

If you see the PMI post to that and 12 report, it was published by about two weeks ago by PMI. And you can find that it's free for download and they were ranking the top Reasons of Project success. And on the top of them was sponsorship. And here I will tell exactly the opposite. The lack of sponsorship is the biggest reason for Failure. So it's really, really important. So if you have a good day sponsor, this will drive you to the success like your sign in the PMI boss.

But if you don't have this, this we'll drive you to it. Very, very serious problem, because the lack of sponsorship will make your work much harder because you will to have a hard time to communicate. You have a very hard time to make risk management plan, to address the scope, to set up boundaries, to work with deadlines, to work with costs. So the sponsor to have a great sponsor drives your project to a successful position.

And the lack of this will make you like an orphan project manager. You need to do everything alone and position yourself. And this is very, very hard. The Fort one that I wanted to share with you, its the inaccurate estimates. You don't spend too much time thinking about time and cost. You do a poor estimate. You think, okay, to build a home, I need Just just bricks and you forget everything else.

And they're home is above and beyond bricks. But bricks, you have a lot of his works that to get a will sum up a large amount of money. So like time and this drives me to the fifth one. It's that over optimist, always squint. We are not accurate in our estimates. We become to be extremely optimist. We work in a perfect situation. We are always thinking in the perfect case, we think, okay, we have support everything good will happen.

Nothing bad will happen. So this is over optimism brings at a completely unrealistic estimate. So we need to understand that the Project is the borderline because of what it is possible and what is impossible to be done. And then this border line is exactly the pace were we need to work with. So this is, this are important. I'm not telling you that being pessimistic is good, but you need to be realistic.

You need to understand that usually all these inaccurate estimates drives you to an over optimist. So to recap the Five that I said today, first one, lack of understanding, project scope. Second one scope creep. Third, one lack of sponsorship. Fourth, one inaccurate estimates and fifth one over optimism. Next week I'll be sharing with you the order five Reasons of Project Failure see you next week.

Thank you very much.

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