I’m often asked why I focus on the causes of project failure rather than placing a greater emphasis on projects that succeeded? I’ve been asked often enough that I’ve written the following post to allow a broader audience to understand the response.
“Although we tend to seek simple, single factored reasons for success, in most important things, success actually requires avoiding the many possible causes of failure” … Jared Diamond (Pulitzer prize winner)
Being assigned to a large project is a little like being dropped off in the middle of a minefield. Your only hope for reaching safety is to avoid stepping on a mine. Although projects don’t have physically exploding mines, the same principle applies. Achieving success requires us to avoid the many possible ways in which a project can go wrong.
Returning to the minefield analogy, assuming you were only allowed to move on foot, there are a number of strategies you could use to reduce your risk of triggering an explosion. You could:
- Take longer strides to reduce the number of places your feet hit the ground
- Stand on tiptoes to reduce the surface area on which you’re stepping
- Run (in the hope that the speed of movement reduces your risk if you were to trigger a mine).
Clearly none of these options are very good. Although you might get lucky and reach safe ground, the odds are stacked against you. To improve your chances more effective solutions need to be found. Obviously the most effective solutions are to: A) have a map of where the mines are hidden or B) carry a mine detector.
Teaching teams to understand the many ways in which projects can fail is the equivalent of giving them a map of where the really big mines are laid and a mine detector with which to detect the rest. Such information is the critical link missing in the way many organizations train their Project Managers and the teams that work in a project environment. That breakdown in training is a key contributor to the very high failure rates projects experience and the very significant loses failed projects cause to the economy as a whole.
Does this mean there is only one way to successfully complete a project? Absolutely not, just as there are many safe paths through a minefield, there are many ways to complete a project successfully. However failure to understand the role of the mines in a minefield is a sure fire way to get your foot blow off. I hope that the lessons contained in this website will help those of you wise enough to read it from stepping on a mine.