Project Failures!!! Why?

By: Parmanand Samaroo; B.Sc (Eng) MBA (Manchester, UK), Dip.Tech EE, M.I.E.T (UK)

Efficiently delivering expected performance for projects remains a critical challenge for many project managers globally. Improving our understanding of how various factors influence project performance is therefore an important research objective. It is necessary to comprehend the processes and testing of temporal models to benchmark project performance (TMPP). Performance can be better understood by separating risk factors into earlier (a priori) risk factors and later (emergent) risk factors, and modeling the influence of the former on the latter. Project performance – the dependent variable – is measured by considering both processes (budget and schedule) and product (outcome) components.

The model includes interactions between risk factors, project management practices, and project performance components and can be tested by using partial least squares analysis with data from a survey of selected numbers of project managers. Results would indicate that the TMPP increases explanatory power when compared with models that link risk factors directly to project performance. The results will also show the importance for active risk management of recognizing, planning for, and managing a priori and emergent risk factors.

The finding of a strong relationship between structural risk factors and subsequent volatility shows the need for risk management practice to recognize the interaction of a priori and emergent risk factors. The results confirm the importance of knowledge resources, organizational support, and project management practices that demonstrate the ways in which they reinforce each other.

In my analysis, lack of clear links between the project and the organization’s key strategic priorities, including agreed measures of success and non-engagement of senior management ownership and leadership merged with ineffective engagement with stakeholders contribute to project outcomes evaporation and budget overruns with compromised project quality.

The case of skills depletion and proven approaches to project and risk management has defined too little attention to breaking development and implementation of projects into manageable steps. Evaluation of proposals driven by initial price rather than long-term value for money (especially securing delivery of business benefits) is the recurrent factor that often compromises project quality.

Ineffective project team integration between clients, the supplier team and the supply chain often incubate links between the project and the organization’s key strategic priorities, including agreed measures of success. I often relate with project officers to investigate if they know how the priority of projects compares and aligns with other delivery and operational activities.

This brings me to the concepts of the critical success factors (CSFs) for the project and the following questions:

• Have the CSFs been agreed with suppliers and key stakeholders?

• Do we have a clear project plan that covers the full period of the planned delivery and all business changes required, indicating the means of benefits realization?

• Is the project founded upon realistic timescales, taking account statutory lead times, and showing critical dependencies so that delays can be effectively handled?

• Are the lessons learnt from relevant projects being applied?

• Has an analysis been undertaken to track any slippage in time, cost, scope or quality?

• Does the project management team have a clear view of the interdependencies between projects, the benefits, and the criteria against which success will be judged?

• Do we understand how we will manage stakeholders (e.g. ensure buy-in, overcome resistance to change, allocate risk to the party best able to manage it)?

Lack of proven approaches to “project and risk management” is a known factor that is commonly eliminated from projects’ life cycles planning. The major risks identified, weighted and treated by the Project Manager and/or project team is always lacking details to identify the issues in the project.

Inadequate approaches for estimating, monitoring and controlling the total expenditure on projects results in project managers’ inability to measure and track the realization of benefits in the project cycle. The question of governance arrangements must be robust enough to ensure “bad news” is not filtered out of progress reports to key stakeholders.

Most project managers do not have an established evaluation approach that allows them to balance financial factors against quality and security of delivery of the project, and the evaluation approach quite often lacks criticality and value engineering analyses.

The elevated requirement for conducting a market evaluation to test market responsiveness to the requirements must be sought so as to establish the procurement routes to prevent the “Bull Whip Effect” in the supply chain that may impact the project negatively.

The Earned Value Management (EVM) technique for measuring project progress in an objective manner is a lost tool in today’s project management execution. EVM has the ability to combine measurements of scope, schedule, and cost in a single integrated system and with the use of the project Gantt chart effectively, the ratios of- Cost Variance percentage, Cost Performance Indicator (CPI), To Complete Cost Performance Indicator (TCPI), Schedule and Cost Performance Index (SCPI) etc can be used to report on project status and forecast future performance trends. It is therefore necessary to ensure that projects’ efficiencies and effectiveness are designed to converge tracking a controlled environment model, as, resource driven models are the recipe to delivering on time and within budget.

“USE OF DATA ON PROJECTS TO MAKE INFORMED DECISIONS IS THE WAY TO TREND PROJECTS”

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