Causes of troubled projects

Project Management, Project Recovery, Uncategorized on October 5th, 2009 1 Comment

So I decided to do a post between knowing when your project is in trouble and action. I thought it might be nice to discuss the causes of troubled projects.

  • Almost always people issues rarely if ever technology issues!
  • Failure to plan, or failure to follow the plan
  • Lack of risk management
  • Poor communication, both within and without the team
  • Hiding of problems (lies)
  • Failure to use change control processes
  • Failure to use source control processes
  • “Build it all at one time” approach
  • “Code like hell” approach
  • Unknown Unknowns
  • Failure to maintain focus
  • Use of unqualified personnel without training them
  • Wishful thinking

    • I’m sure if we all sat down and thought about it for 30 minutes we could come up with a list of a hundred or more causes of project failure. But I’m also fairly sure that if we thought about it a bit more we could fit all 100 of those into one or more of the listed items above. My experience has taught me that project trouble almost always comes from two main sources – personnel issues and poor choices by management or a combination of the two.

    One Response to “Causes of troubled projects”

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