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Many companies embark on projects of different sizes, complexity and importance every month. These companies are probably familiar the well known Project Management methods such as Prince2. However the desire or need to keep costs as low as possible often results in these projects being undertaken with little or no Project Management. As a result many projects fail completely or fail to deliver all that was expected.
Most projects that fail do so because companies often:
- fail to take into account the needs and influences of stakeholders and focus entirely on the customer
- fail to communicate and keep the stakeholders informed of developments;
- display a lack of attention to the impact of project work on the normal business of the organisation
- try to produce complex or expensive 'Gold plated' solutions when simple solutions or changes in business processes would suffice
- fail to identify and deal with the many risks that can affect achievement of project objectives
- insufficient attention to planning, monitoring and control of the work of the project
- do not have an agreed change management process to allow for changes to the project definition during the life of the project
At SBO our philosophy is that the root cause of project failure is lack of communication and the tendency of stakeholders to reassign resources without agreement causing delay. Many projects are prone to delays because partners often need to realign the resources to "fight fires" elsewhere in their organisation or customer base. This can be managed properly only when there is an independent Project Manager that is able to control the resource allocation and communicate the risks to all parties.
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