Why Projects Fail

Posts under ‘Training’

Attitudes for Altitude

Lesson learned: Hire for attitude and potential, not just experience. Category: Person skills development / hiring. The following post is a “Lesson Learned“ that comes from the analysis of the failed projects documented in the “Catalogue of Catastrophe” or from the experiences the editorial team have had working with clients around the world. The post is published here [...]

Cheese and Onion – Frameworks for Analyzing Project Failure

When it comes to improving success rates, the commercial aviation sector has been one of the most successful. In 1930 taking a commercial flight was risky business. When you board a flight today, the chances of an accident taking your life is about 1 in 30 million. Through rigorous accident investigations and a willingness to [...]

The Sink Side of “Sink or Swim”

Lesson learned: Quantify a candidate’s experience. Category: Leadership development / hiring. The following post is a “Lesson Learned” that comes from the analysis of the failed projects documented in the “Catalogue of Catastrophe” or from the experiences the editorial team have had working with clients around the world. The post is published here to spark discussion and [...]

In the news – Project Management on the ascent

Project Management is a field that has experienced rapid growth in recent years.  Although the origins of Project Management lie in the field of construction, the value of Project Management is now being recognized by organizations throughout the economy. Recent data attained from a major Canada wide job posting website demonstrates that growth and shows [...]

Befuddle, Bewilder and Baffle

In the Project Management world, it’s a refrain that is repeated in almost every training program offered around the world; communicate, communicate, communicate. Despite the fact that students of Project Management are told that as much as 80% of a Project Manager’s time is spent communicating, in most Project Management training courses, as little as [...]

Say it with Samples

Lesson learned: Use real life samples to make training more effective. Category: Training / skills development. The following post is a “Lesson Learned” that comes from the analysis of the failed projects documented in the “Catalogue of Catastrophe” or from the experiences the editorial team have had working with clients around the world. The post is published [...]

Social Learning

Being something of a Systems Thinker, I often find myself reflecting on events to see if I can understand the cause and effect relationships that drive the outcomes we attain. Working in the field of education, that interest has caused me to look deeply into the way individuals learn and how different modes of teaching [...]

Revisisting Deming

Most people who have been through basic management or quality management training will have been exposed to the work of Edwards Deming. Known particularly for his work in helping Japanese companies establish a quality culture, Deming is regarded as a founding father of the quality movement. Although Deming is best known for his use of [...]

The Process Fallacy

As many readers will know, the idea of “continual process improvement” is a pillar of the quality management movement. By improving processes, the root cause of problems that allow mistakes to be made can be eliminated, thereby allowing the organization to produce higher quality goods and services. Although the idea of continual improvement started in [...]

Steering Clear of Shoddy

Although home renovation projects and IT projects may not appear to have much in common, there is one regard in which they are striking similar, both suffer from undesirably high failure rates. In Canada, TV personality and master contractor Mike Holmes draws attention to failed home renovations projects in his show “Holmes on Homes”. Each [...]