How to avoid project failure

Project Assurance Resources

How to avoid project failure

The information in this guide is intended for general purposes only. For more specific guidance around your organisation’s projects, please get in touch with our team.

In this section, you will find:

Spend more time on scoping the project
Conduct a full assessment of potential risks
Put the structure around project governance
Maintain reporting practises closely
Proactively resolve roadblocks and stakeholder disagreements
Keep external vendors accountable and set their brief clearly
Review the project’s health with the help of assurance experts
Where to next?

When serious time, money, blood, sweat and tears go into an organisational project, failure can be absolutely crushing for all those involved. What makes these failures even more difficult to go through is when they blindside an organisation; with more preparation and systems around the running of the project, potential risks could have been identified and addressed well before the threat of failure.

In this guide, we’ll talk about project failure and what can be done to avoid it.

Spend more time on scoping the project

One of the most common issues that you will likely experience or hear about in a project’s long list of challenges is that of a scope that doesn’t accurately line up with the real world requirements of the project. In scope/out of scope discussions can absorb project managers and stakeholders for combined hundreds of hours.

When the scope is left ambiguous, there’s more risk that additional pieces of delivery will be introduced at the insistence of particularly vocal stakeholders. The roll on effect of out of scope work entering the delivery stage is that other more important work suffers.

Too much out of scope work will pull budget away from critical delivery and can leave the organisation with a half finished project and no money to complete it. Had the scope been detailed, deeply researched and protected from all angles, many of these projects would have succeeded.

The project’s scope being inadequately defined also puts tremendous pressure on project managers and even delivery team members to protect their time. A well-scoped project should allow a PM and delivery team to do what they do best – deliver work.

Getting into the details and creating a good scope of work can be contributed to by as many stakeholders as is necessary, along with business analysts (BAs) and leadership teams. Consider the project’s parameters from the perspective of:

Who the customers are
What the technical requirements are
What minimum functionality it needs to deliver
What it doesn’t need to deliver (out of scope)
Technologies and vendors required for delivery
What the key objectives and milestones are
Known constraints and restrictions the project will consider

Getting these questions or considerations answered and addressed early can cut out a lot of extra time down the track. It’s important that the outcomes of these discussions at scope stage are captured somewhere to refer to by anyone involved in the project. This is often called a scope document or scope statement.

Conduct a full assessment of potential risks

What could possibly go wrong? It turns out, plenty in a complex project. Project failure is often caused by a risk that wasn’t foreseen or given enough thought. Organisations benefit greatly from a project scope and plan having rocks thrown at it figuratively speaking. A full assessment of project risks may be led by someone internally with specific skills on how to surface these, but will likely need to be a team effort across the organisation when building more detailed profiles and mitigations of these risks.

The lead up to a project actually kicking off is often not long enough to complete such activities. We’d suggest allowing at least a couple of months to get scope and risk assessments workshopped and done – but longer than that might be required to do as thorough a review as possible.

Some of the risk areas that should be assessed include:

People risks – does the project rely on certain people for success?
Customer risks – internally or externally, what is the risk to customer satisfaction if a project does not deliver?
Budget risks – are there any potential factors that could reduce or expend the budget inefficiently and not allow project completion?
Technology risks – does the project’s success rely on certain platforms or technologies? How could these changes impact the project?
Operational risks – what other business functions could prevent the project from being delivered?
Resource risks – will there be enough available resource both initially and in the market to replace departing team members to complete the project?
Scope risks – what sort of impacts would scope creep in certain areas have on the project?

Preparing for the worst is one of the more proven ways to avoid the worst. Risk assessment is a complex process, but the investment is worth it.

Put the structure around project governance

Governance is more than just a status report every few months. Projects need to have a framework that provides guidance on sign off, meetings, reporting, risks, comms and even how the project management office will operate. And governance members need the experience and expertise to support, champion and challenge the project.

You can read more about what project governance is and how it helps in our dedicated guide.

Having a strong layer of governance around a project is effective in avoiding failure because it removes a lot of questions around visibility and performance of the project. When the governance layer is missing, the project becomes much more reliant on certain individuals proactively managing and communicating on the project. In a busy project delivery environment, these jobs can fall by the wayside. Governance processes keep everyone dialled in and the project anchored to something.

Maintain reporting practises closely

When a steering committee or leadership team doesn’t know the reality of where a project is at, they’re unable to provide support properly – whether that’s breaking down roadblocks, signing off scope changes or even freeing up resources or budget.

Good reporting practises can serve to communicate the project’s status effectively. And it’s not just leadership teams that will benefit; stakeholders across the business who may play a part in signing off components of the work will also gain from effective internal reporting as they can better understand what requirements there may be from them to keep the project on track and deliver milestones.

Reporting may cover things like:

Budget
Progress against timelines
Outstanding delivery
Upcoming sprints or deliverables
Project Manager updates

Each project may demand a different set of metrics and insights to keep all stakeholders informed. The practice of reporting itself however, will greatly improve the intelligence on which the business can make decisions to keep the project on track and steering away from failure. In effective project delivery, transparency is your friend.

Proactively resolve roadblocks and stakeholder disagreements

Disagreements and challenges left ignored or minimised can spell disaster for a project later on. As difficult as conflict can be to face head on, avoiding it entirely is planting seeds for serious issues later on.

Disagreements between the project delivery team and a stakeholder, or between stakeholders themselves around the scope of work can take a while to resolve. This is why project governance is so important – it will outline the roles and responsibilities when escalation is required. Without this, there can be a lengthy negotiation or debate that can put strain on professional relationships. It’s easy to understand how conflict can snowball and really place a handbrake on the continuity of a project!

Keep external vendors accountable and set their brief clearly

Many projects are made up of a project team (either contractors or permanent staff) and relationships with vendors who supply services to help the project be delivered. In the corporate world, a good example of this is the engagement of specialist technology companies to build or supply a new system. The combination of an internal project team and specialist vendor can sometimes be the most economical and effective way of delivering the project’s desired objective.

However, in much the same way that internal teams and stakeholders need to be managed carefully, so too does an external vendor. They require a clear brief and scope in order to make sure their efforts are being spent on the right thing. A vendor will likely charge on regardless, so it’s crucial the business has given direction properly. With this said, a proper procurement and scope process should ensure that the expectations are both clear and able to be used to maintain accountability. If a vendor is not delivering what is required, the business must be effective in communicating this and resetting course early.

There are many well-known instances of projects that went over budget and ultimately failed due to a poor vendor relationship or brief. Avoiding such a situation is part of what we review and advise on in our quality assurance process.

Review the project’s health with the help of assurance experts

Which brings us to the final point about project failure. Oftentimes the best intentions and most capable people on a project don’t have the ability to sit outside the business and provide objective assessments on the current health and likelihood of success. There are also a number of QA methodologies that can be applied to project reviews that a specialist provider will draw upon. Project failure might be evident through a number of seemingly unconnected factors that make it hard for those internal to spot – even a project steering committee.

By engaging with an external project quality assurance provider, businesses can get a report on where the holes exist and also benefit from guidance to resolve these. These findings early on can help redirect a project’s focus and address issues like poor governance before they turn into issues that derail everything. Even later in a project, if things are starting to go wrong, independent assurance can help provide guidance to right the ship.

But QA shouldn’t be brought in as the ambulance at the bottom of the hill. The best case scenario is that QA is baked into every stage of the project from early scoping to post-delivery retrospectives. Surrounding the project with this support gives leadership and delivery teams the peace of mind that things are moving in the right direction.

Where to next?

Read our other project resources:

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