Ask someone in the project delivery world what kills a project, and they will usually point to something technical. The scope was unclear. The technology did not perform as advertised. The vendor underdelivered. The requirements kept changing. These things do happen and they do make projects harder to deliver. But at IQANZ, having reviewed more New Zealand public sector and private programmes than most, we find ourselves giving a different answer. When we look at the projects that have been genuine failures, they have rarely failed solely because the process was broken or because the technology let everyone down. Most of them have been derailed by people stuff.

People stuff. It sounds deceptively simple. But it covers an enormous amount of territory: interpersonal dynamics between a sponsor and a project manager that never quite gel, a team that takes too long to form and disperses before it gets to perform, a project director change that wipes out institutional knowledge at exactly the wrong moment, and the covert resistance of staff who fear what the project will mean for their jobs. These are the things that actually derail many New Zealand projects, and they are the hardest to name, the hardest to fix, and the most likely to be absent from a risk register.

What Actually Makes a Good Project

Before exploring how the people element goes wrong, it is worth being clear about what right looks like. Our answer to what makes a good project at its core is straightforward.

At its bare bones, a successful project is a marriage of good people, good decision-making, and enough process to control it, with the project team being given the room to actually do the work. Four things. The fourth is as important as the first three.

Giving the project room to do its work is easy to miss, because it sounds passive. It’s anything but. It means a sponsor who sets direction and then genuinely trusts the team to execute. It means governance that asks good questions and makes good decisions, rather than micromanaging the detail. It means an organisational environment that doesn’t undermine the project’s authority at the first sign of friction. Getting all four of these things right at the same time is harder than it sounds, and the absence of any one of them puts the project at risk.

This sounds straightforward in principle. In practice, the further up an organisation you go, the harder it becomes to leave space for a team to operate. Senior leaders have strong opinions, reputations tied to outcomes, and often more confidence in their own judgment than the situation warrants. The result is a kind of gravitational pull toward interference that good project governance has to actively resist.

The Third Project Director Problem

One of the most reliable warning signs for a programme in trouble is leadership churn. We have seen it often enough to have a name for it: the third project director problem. It describes the scenario where a project is already on its third senior leader, having cycled through two before arriving at the current person. Each transition costs more than most organisations are willing to acknowledge.

The pattern is consistent. The first two project directors have either not been up to scratch, or have seen the writing on the wall and moved on because they could see the project was not set up to succeed. Each departure takes institutional knowledge with it. Each arrival resets the team’s dynamic and introduces a new perspective that may or may not be aligned with what the project actually needs. The governance overhead of onboarding a new director, while the clock is ticking on delivery, is significant. The loss of confidence in the sponsoring organisation can be even more costly.

The third project director is often, to their credit, an improvement. They come in with clearer eyes and no sunk cost in the decisions that got the project to its current state. But they are also starting from further back than they should be, and the organisation is absorbing the cost of two transitions that, in a well-set-up project, should not have happened.

The broader point is that turnover is a signal. The ratio of turnover to continuity is one of the most useful flags we look for when assessing project health. A project that keeps its people is usually a project that is functioning. A project that keeps losing key people is telling you something important, and it’s worth paying attention rather than treating each departure as an isolated event.

Why good people leave

The answer to this is usually one of two things. Either the project isn’t set up to succeed and experienced professionals can see that, or the conditions aren’t in place for people to do their best work.

Nobody wants to be involved in something they know isn’t likely to be successful because of things outside their control. Professional integrity leads good people to move on to somewhere they can make a genuine difference. It’s not about the pay (although sometimes that’s the extra shove). It’s mostly about being in an environment where the work is actually going somewhere.

Project management is more mobile than most professions. Skilled project managers, programme directors, and delivery professionals are consistently in demand across New Zealand’s public and private sectors. They don’t have to stay in an environment that doesn’t allow them to work well (and many won’t stay). When procurement rules force a team change at an arbitrary anniversary, or when a sponsor consistently undermines the team’s authority, the people you most want to keep are usually the first to assess their options.

A well-performing project, conversely, creates its own retention dynamic. Everyone wants to be involved in projects that are succeeding. They want that outcome on their CV. They want to see the thing delivered for the better good of whatever it‘s trying to achieve. Success is self-reinforcing in this sense: a project that is going well attracts and retains talented people, which makes it more likely to continue going well.

The Continuity Problem in New Zealand’s Public Sector

New Zealand’s public sector has a specific version of the continuity problem that we encounter regularly. Procurement rules, designed to ensure fairness and transparency in how the Crown engages contractors, can work directly against the continuity of effective teams. A high-performing team that’s been working together for two years and has one year left to deliver may face re-procurement at a set anniversary regardless of whether the project needs continuity or disruption.

The logic of the rule is sound, but it’s practical effect can be counterproductive. A well-oiled team with one year to go, forced into re-recruitment, loses momentum and institutional knowledge at exactly the point when it should be delivering. Different ideas come in. Relationships reset. The project can be derailed by a rule that was never designed with its specific situation in mind.

What protects against this is strong sponsorship: a project sponsor who’s willing to make the case for continuity, to navigate the procurement process with the project’s interests in mind, and to push back when a rule designed for a different context is being applied in a way that actively harms delivery.

Te Kawa Mataaho, the Public Service Commission, provides guidance on workforce planning and workforce capability in the public sector, and its frameworks acknowledge the tension between procurement compliance and operational effectiveness. The day-to-day reality of navigating that tension still falls to individual projects and their sponsors, and it requires the kind of senior advocacy that not every programme has access to.

When Teams Do Not Get to Form

There’s a framework that anyone who has worked in team dynamics will recognise: the forming, storming, norming, and performing stages through which groups move as they learn to work together. The problem for project teams is that this process takes time, and projects often do not give them that time.

A project is a unique environment. It brings different people together in combinations that have never existed before, with their own culture to build and install before they start performing. It can take some time to get there, and then the project delivers and they go away again. By the time a project team is truly high-performing, they are often close to the end. The next project starts the cycle again.

This is not an easy problem to fix. Not many organisations have a neat pipeline of projects that allows the same team to move from one piece of work to the next. Not all projects need the same kind of people to allow such a move. But it does mean that the time invested in team formation is genuinely valuable and should be protected, not compressed, and that the conditions for teams to work well together matter in a very practical sense.

Change Resistance and the Covert Blocker

People dynamics on a project are rarely confined to the project team itself. A programme designed to change how an organisation operates will encounter resistance from within that organisation, and not always in ways that are easy to see or easy to address.

Fear of job loss is a powerful motivator, and it doesn’t usually manifest as open objection. Instead, slow responses, incomplete information, scope complications, stakeholder concerns that seem to multiply overnight, and a general friction that is hard to point at directly and impossible to ignore start to emerge. Programmes that are designed to drive business change create genuine nervousness in the teams affected. Some of those teams will block the project, deliberately, in covert ways, because delivering the project might change their existence.

This is a change management challenge as much as it is a project management challenge. Change management is not a communications plan bolted onto the side of a project schedule. It’s the substantive work of understanding what the project means for every affected group, making sure those groups have honest information about what’s happening and why, and building the conditions for people to engage constructively with the change rather than resist it. Done well, it requires as much attention and resources as the technical delivery workstream.

The Need for a Psychology Degree

The human complexity of project delivery is real. You almost need a psychology degree to navigate the way that people dynamics interact within a programme. If everyone were predictable and rational, delivery would be straightforward. You would just build the thing and do the thing and it would all fit together. But programmes are run by humans, for humans, and that changes everything.

The human element of any project is simultaneously the thing that makes it interesting and the thing that makes it genuinely hard. Managing the interpersonal dynamics, the different pressures, the different ways of thinking, the different agendas, the anxiety and the ambition and the politics: these are the things that make programme management a real discipline, not just a set of templates and processes. That complexity is what makes the work rewarding. It is also what makes it consistently challenging.

Understanding this complexity is part of what effective programme assurance is designed to do. An external reviewer who is not caught up in the same relationships and dynamics can often see things that the team can’t see (or can’t afford to see) from inside, and name them in a way that is useful rather than threatening. The interpersonal tension between a sponsor and a programme director, the key person whose engagement is quietly declining, the team culture that has developed a workaround for a governance problem it should be solving: these are visible from outside in ways they are not always visible from inside.

What This Means for How You Set Up

The practical takeaway is about how seriously organisations take the human dimension when setting up a project. Getting the right people into the right roles, at the right time, and creating the conditions for them to stay and do their best work, is not a soft consideration alongside the real planning work. It is the real planning work.

The right person matters more than the legal mechanism used to engage them. Whether they come in on a fixed term, a contract, or a permanent role is secondary. The cost of not having the right people is greater than most organisations account for, and churn is costly in time, money, and confidence in ways that compound quickly.

Get the people right, give them the room to operate, build the governance to support them rather than second-guess them, and protect their continuity through the life of the project. If you can do those four things, the process and the technology will follow.