back to briefing papers
Project Management - Why Projects Fail

by Stuart Cooke

Introduction

Over 70% of IT projects fail.  Usually these projects complete but costs are far higher than budgeted and timescales are much longer than planned.  They fail not because of a lack of effort, but effort targeted in the wrong places.

Typical characteristics of project failure include:

  • exceeding the planned timescale by more than 50%

  • exceeding cost estimates by more than 35%

  • substantially fails to support business processes

  • substantially fails to deliver anticipated benefits.

The key causes of such a failure include:

  • lack of senior management involvement and commitment

  • failure to focus on key business and end-user needs

  • failure to break complex projects into manageable chunks

  • poor project management

  • poor risk management and contingency planning

  • unclear contracts and poor contract management

  • insufficient focus on user training and testing

  • lack of, or poor, project management and systems development methodologies.

The characteristics and causes of failure are so common, that often we don’t need to ask why a project failed – it’s the same old story!

In this briefing paper we identify the most common causes of failure within each phase of the project lifecycle.  As many failures arise through lack of control of third party suppliers, I have given some specific emphasis to managing these relationships.