Deciphering Project Failures: Before Project is Awarded!

According to research by the Project Management Institute, only 48% of projects achieve success in 2024. A staggering 40% linger in a grey zone, neither succeeding nor failing outright, and 12% are marked as complete failures, highlighting the critical need for effective project management strategies.

Project management is the backbone of a successful project, and provides the framework for planning, executing, and delivering projects on time every time and within budget. To achieve this, there is a need to incorporate effective strategies during the conceptualization to enable organizations to deliver projects on time, within budget, and to the required standard. Without effective strategies, the projects are bound to fail despite deploying the best resources.

In IT project management, there is always an emphasis on finding out the reasons for the project failure during or after the execution of the project. However, failure or success is defined by the way organizations approach the RFP, estimate, set up the governance model, build contingency, and write the contract.

In other words, practitioners give several reasons for project failures during or after the project's execution. However, no one talks about project failures due to various reasons that were sowed when the project was being conceptualised.

Poor execution is one of the consequences of poor strategies at the conceptualized phase.

The whitepaper presents the potential reasons for failure that’s set in during the conceptualisation phase.

Overwhelmed by goals

Project management plays a crucial role in driving organizational success by ensuring that projects are completed on time, within budget, and to stakeholders' satisfaction. However, some organisations get overwhelmed by their own goals and, in a bid to achieve their goals, often neglect the way the projects are conceptualized and projects to be executed. Since these organisations are driven by their “overwhelmed goals,” they tend to miss the basic principles that are required to make the project successful, like

• Review of response to the proposals,
• Realistic estimation,
• Holistic Governance model,
• Mapping of scope vs deliverables
• Definition of Acceptance criteria
• Availability of strong PMO and
• Effective plan

No/minimal time to start the project

Effective project management involves identifying and allocating the "right" resources for project success.

However, there is a push to start the project on the very next day after signing the contract so that the revenue meter gets started even though they have sub-standard or no/minimal resources available to be deployed.

The process needs to be established to have the moratorium period to kick off the project.

Misaligned Stakeholders

Misaligned stakeholders at the conceptualized phase may bring the following outcomes:

• Ambiguous scope
• Not understanding the real pain points of the clients
• The team is not able to clearly comprehend the non-functional requirements, such as the missing phase of “Go Live Support,” WCAG compliance, Security testing, etc.
• The team is not able to clearly outline the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder, for example – the RACI matrix.
• Absence of change request process.

It is very important to bring all stakeholders on the same page to agree on the project’s objectives and scope, which in turn helps them understand the project deeply.

Unrealistic Estimation

Project estimation forecasts the resources, time, and costs required to complete a project. Project estimation lays a crucial foundation for successful project execution.

Several key factors influence the accuracy of project estimates. A clearly defined project scope with well-understood deliverables forms the foundation for reliable estimates. Uncertainties around project requirements can lead to underestimations or scope creep subsequently.

However, often the project is unrealistically estimated rather than realistically.

The project estimates should be based on the facts and effectively stitched with goals and objectives. The right estimation techniques along with the delivery team to be involved during the early stages. All the activities with duration have to be sequenced, and the buffer should be built into the estimates.

Missing Discovery/Design Phase

The organisations build some of the activities into the plan, which should be outside of the project and to be catered to in the discovery or design phase before starting the project. This activity requires collaboration and mutual discussion with the client. The output of these activities should be fed into the project plan.

For example: UX/UI design – These types of activities enable designers to collaborate with the stakeholders to run workshops as per user centred design process to deliver prototypes that bring value to both business and end user. The design process is elaborative in nature and takes time to deliver artefacts like persona, journey maps, prioritised features to define the roadmap, user flows, and hi-fidelity prototypes. Also, Validation and refinements of these artefacts as per stakeholder feedback are required to sign off the final design deliverables as per the prioritised roadmap. All these activities are difficult to be timebound.

Thus, it should be dealt separately before the project kicks off.

Missing onshore/near shore presence

In today's dynamic business landscape, it is difficult to deploy most of the resources on-site due to the cost. However, at the same time, it is also not recommended to keep all the resources offshore. It has to be a hybrid model with the majority of the resources offshore and some key roles like Business Analyst, Technical Architect, and onsite coordinator to be deployed on-site especially in fixed-price engagements. The benefits include:

• Quick turnaround on the blockers, which requires client involvement
• Team gets their questions clarified through the onsite resource
• Transparent project status and clear communication at all levels
• Good understanding of each other’s working styles leads to long-term benefits
• Optimized resource deployment, quality, project, and process management
• Onsite resource mines the account and help generate more business

Deploying an onshore or nearshore counterpart significantly improves the chances of successfully completing the project

Conclusion

The relationship between project management and organisational diligence at the time of conceptualisation is, therefore, critical to achieve project success.