Schedule slippage, quality flaws and budget overruns are the familiar symptoms of a project in trouble. In business projects such problems are sadly all too common and improving success rates is one of management’s greatest challenges. It’s estimated that project failures cost the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars annually. To illustrate the point, our Catalogue of Catastrophe provides an ongoing record of some of the most notable and interesting project failures from around the world.

Such loses are a drag on the economy, a threat to the viability of the organizations executing the projects and stressful for the individuals involved. To help organizations improve project success rates, and to act as a learning resource for Project Managers around the world, this site is dedicated to answering the questions “why do projects fail?” and “how can we improve success rates?”

The following pages provide a start point for exploring the content in this website:

• Start point – What does success look like – Before we can discuss why projects fail it is useful to first agree on what we men by success.
• Common classes of project failure – Failures come in many shapes and forms there are however common patterns and classifications that help use orientate our understanding of why projects fail
• The role of decision-making – Decisions can be thought of as the stepping-stones of progress in a project. As such the outcomes a project achieves is often a reflection of the decisions made. Consistently make good decisions and the chances of success are high. Make poor decisions and the chances of success starts to fade.
• Leadership – Managers, sponsors, Project Managers, technical leaders lie at the center of the decision making processes and set the tone for a project. Effective leaders set the stage upon which success can be achieved. Poor leadership sows the seeds from which disasters are born.