Project management: what could go wrong

I have been refreshing my knowledge of project management.

I first studied project management as a civil engineering student more than 40 years ago. Project management can be a sophisticated discipline for managing large projects.

However, any one-off activity is really a project and it is useful for coaches to have an understanding of the basics of project management.

In this Coaching Note I'll list a few things that can go wrong – always worth considering before you start thinking about a process. In the next article, I'll write about project charters so that you have a check list of things to ensure that your project is successful.

This list is taken from Project Management for Dummies, an excellent resource. From my experience, I can recommend any title in the Dummies series.

Ten reasons for failure

Lack of clear objectives: Nobody's really sure what the project is about, much less are people agreed on it.

Lack of risk management: Things go wrong that someone could easily have foreseen and then controlled to some degree or even prevented.

No senior management buy-in: Senior managers were never convinced and so never supported the project, leading to problems such as lack of resource. Neither did those managers exercise normal management supervision as they routinely do in other areas of responsibility.

Poor planning: Actually, that's being kind, because often the problem is that no planning was done at all. It's not surprising, then, when things run out of control, and not least because nobody knows where the project should be at this point anyway.

No clear progress milestones: This follows on from poor planning. The lack of milestones means nobody sees when things are off track, and problems go unnoticed for a long time.

Understated scope: The scope and project plan are superficial and understate both what the project needs to deliver and the resource needed to deliver it. Project staff (often team members) then discover the hidden but essential components later in the project. The additional work that is necessary then takes the project out of control, causing delay to the original schedule and overspending against the original budget.

Poor communications: So many projects fail because of communication breakdown, which can stem from unclear roles and responsibilities from poor senior management attitudes, such as not wanting to hear bad news.

Unrealistic resource levels: It just isn't possible to do a project of the required scope with such a small amount of resource – staff, money or both.

Unrealistic timescales: The project just can't be delivered by the required times, so it's doomed to failure.

No change control: People add in things bit by bit – scope creep. Then it dawns on everyone that the project's grown so big that it can't be delivered within the fixed budget or by the set deadline.

This list applies to large projects; but it is just as useful for any project, however, small. It is a useful starting point for a coaching session for reviewing problems in the past, and planning projects in the future.

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