From the category archives:

Failing projects

Why projects fail: the presentation

August 18, 2008

Last month I gave a presentation at the Nottingham and Derby branch of the British Computer Society about why projects fail – which, as regular readers will know, is a subject close to my heart. It was a pretty good evening: lots of people turned out, including some of the BCS Women group [...]

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Closing down projects

July 6, 2008

15% of all projects are shut down before they complete, according to Microsoft. There’s various different reasons for this, and companies should handle closing down projects with sensitivity. Here’s a video clip of me in discussion with Deborah Hall about stopping projects.

(Video clip used with permission)

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Failing projects: the presentation

June 11, 2008

I’m giving a talk in Nottingham next month.  It’s been a while since I’ve been that far north.  I always got really excited being driven through the town when I was younger, as Robin Hood could have been in the forest somewhere.  There’s been a recent TV series about him that I’ve watched with a [...]

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Back from the brink

February 12, 2008

Andrew Ball, head of IT Performance Audit at the Audit Commission, was one of the speakers at last week’s BPUG Congress. He spoke during a session in the strategic project and programme management strand about how to cope when projects go wrong.
The main thrust of his argument was trying to avoid projects going wrong [...]

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Advice from the Fiddler on the Project

December 3, 2007

I listened to Rich Maltzman talking about his forthcoming book Fiddler on the Project (co-authored with Ranjit Biswas) on Controlling Chaos, way back in July. We’ve been corresponding since, trying to find time to talk about project management and authoring. I finally got round to asking him some questions last week, and from [...]

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Networking (part 2)

November 19, 2007

The other event I attended recently was hosted by the British Computer Society’s North London branch. ‘ITIL deliver – can you manage IT?’ was held at the Learning Tree International offices near Euston Station. My experiences of Learning Tree are pretty limited: they sent me an annoying amount of catalogues for their training courses [...]

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Everyone’s talking about it…

November 8, 2007

Although my series on failing projects has come to an end (missed it? click on Failing Projects in the categories list), it seems like everywhere I look someone is talking about pear-shaped projects.
Luke Barrett, a senior business analyst from software company Thoughtworks, has been writing about how to stop software projects going wrong.  Luke’s article [...]

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Changing the perception of ‘failed’ projects

October 29, 2007
This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Failing projects

I have written before about the fact that some projects are stopped for good reasons. Businesses need to be very transparent when that happens to ensure all relevant parties understand why and, crucially, agree that it is the right thing to do. Communication within the organisation needs to be carefully managed so that [...]

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Project governance for Parliament

October 22, 2007
This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series Failing projects

The construction of the new Scottish Parliament building is a good example of how things can go so wrong on a project.
The innovative design was in its early stages when the procurement process started. Architects were bidding to deliver something within a specification of 20,740 m² and £50m. At this point, there were [...]

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Why do projects fail?

October 15, 2007
This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series Failing projects

There must be a good reason why all these projects fail.  There is; in fact, there are many factors that contribute to project failure.  The UK Office of Government Commerce did a study that shows the main reasons that projects fail are:

lack of clear executive leadership (the ‘missing’ Sponsor)
poor processes for identifying and managing risks [...]

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