The 5 Reasons Why Projects Fail

Do your projects suffer from these undesirable effects?

• delivery date is well past due date
• your resources are overloaded
• your resources are not available when needed (even when promised)
• your scope suffers from excessive changes (due to long project timelines)
• there are changing priorities & constant rework

There are five main reasons why your projects struggle with these problems:

1. Bad multi-tasking - do you or your team constantly face shifting priorities that cause reources to stop one task and work on another? Is someone waiting for the output of your task before they can do their work? This is the definition of bad multitasking.  Often the culprit is poor prioritization. We are asked to start several tasks simultaneously and each of them has a "customer" waiting for the output. Each customer wants progress to be made on their task and constantly asks - "is it done yet?" - forcing us to repeatedly switch to their task to get something done and report progress. While working on this task other customers request status on their respective tasks. This cycle forces us to task switch repeatedly.
2. Student syndrome - this is also known as procrastination.  Student syndrome is a natural defense mechanism. It means to put off the work until the last possible moment not because we are lazy, in fact we are working very hard, but because urgent tasks will take precedence over important tasks.  Due to competing demands we delay the start of tasks until we absolutely must start.
3. Parkinson's law - this is defined as "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." In a project sense, Parkinson's law rears it's ugly head when team members embed greater safety in task estimates because they feel like their estimates will not be "estimates", but rather committments.  In order to make sure they deliver on their "committments", team members add in slack to allow for the uncertainty.
4. Task dependency - if you have a task that was estimated to take 5 days and you started immediately, and completed the task “early,” is the person that receives your output ready to use it immediately? Not usually. Therefore, if you deliver the results in 3 days the next person will not touch it for 2 additional days because they are not scheduled to start their task until that time. To overcome this problem you must have a project system that ensures all tasks begin, not when they are scheduled to begin, but when the required inputs are available.
5. PM math where 2+2=5 - each of the above scenarios contribute to the final reasons why projets struggle..."project math". 

Each of these problems not only drain the company of valuable resources, it also causes a delay in the potential cash flow that results from a finished project.  Remember, if you keep doing what you have always done you will keep getting what you've always got -- late projects. 

To remove these obstacles you will need to stop bad multitasking, develop a system that allows early and late tasks to cancel each other out, account for the probability of dependent events, stop the effects of Parkinson's Law, ensure that when one task completes the results appear almost instantaneously to the next task in line, and stop the practice of adding safety to each task.