Top 3 Causes Of Project Failure

Many project managers finds it difficult to admit their failure in project implementation. Although there are so many resources and guidelines available on project management, yet project failure tends to receive little or no attention at all. Project failure has turned out to be a widespread phenomenon especially in poorly planned and executed projects.
In this article, efforts were made to identify the three most common causes of Project Failure and proffer possible solutions to them. Understanding these points will help you become more prepared for any task ahead. Let’s go!
Lack Of Visibility To Information
The common cause of project failure is inability to access adequate information at the right time by the three levels of the project team namely executive management, project managers and team members.
The executive managements hardly know anything about all the current enterprise projects and they do not have access to the project schedules in real time. The sponsors and the executive management do not have information about schedule or even reports until it becomes very late to either cancel the project or change the director of the effort.
The project managers usually set up a schedule and plan at the beginning of the project. The schedule hardly gets updated as a result of one pronounced reason which is...
The project managers are highly occupied with managing issues and re-organization of resources that they hardly find time to update the tasks on schedule and access their impacts.
Furthermore, project managers lack access to all the projects their resources are working on, this makes it difficult to know exactly the project their resources are working on for that particular day.
On the other hand, team members hardly know the tasks they are supposed to work on. They are often confused about task priority especially when working on multiple projects at the same time.
Poor Communication Mechanism
This is a common issue with project implementation and execution. Thus, when a project is being executed, there is no centralized display of project history.
On the executive management level, they rely on weekly or monthly status report from the project managers. As a result of this, information is left in the hands of project managers making it seem as if they are holding the information hostage.
Project managers make use of email to reach out to every member of a group about a particular project. An issue usually arise when some team members do not receive such information whereas the assumption is that every team member has already been communicated.
Team members on their own find it difficult sorting through the high volume of emails sent to them, this practice wastes a lot of valuable time making it difficult for team members to communicate effectively.
Poor Planning
Planning is vital to the success of any project. Based on this, it is very important to show what project success and failure mean at the onset of any project. Also, taking these tasks down to the team members is very vital.
The Solution
The best alternative lies in the combination of processes, tools and people-oriented changes.
In terms of tool, the team has to be provided with a central location for publishing all project schedules. Additionally, a far better solution is to push projects and documents to share point.
Then, the process aspect of solution is to assist team members to update their personal works on the central system.
Now, the success of project implementation involves the role of the executive management. The executive management ought to let all the team members know the usefulness of updating tasks and project daily. The people should be equipped and carried along in order to have a successful and durable project. With these steps in place Project Failure will be history!