Five Reasons Why Projects Don’t Succeed – Inspired by Dilbert
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It’s Friday so, I would like to talk a little bit about why projects fail through some inspiration I got while enjoying some Dilbert comics.
1. Bureaucracy
In every organization you have certified experts you need to talk to, regulations to follow and approvals to get. Pretty normal. However, projects suffer when people within organizations use these as a a way to show authority or like the kids like to say these days, to “flex”. Flex meaning p.e. to “show off muscle” to acquire respect from others. Anyway, projects suffer a lot due to house activities being slowed by things like this, simple because some people feel they need to display “power”
2. Stagnating Feasibility Study
Manager: “I need some numbers to approve the study.”
Dilbert: “But that’s why we want to a feasibility study”
Manager:”Make your best guess”
Dilbert: “You want me to guess, so that I can get an approval to find out that which I had to guess”
Manager: “Yes”
Sometimes you fall into a chicken and egg problem in which you need approval to perform some business research. But, you can’t perform it because you need some numbers on the research. But you can’t because that’s the very reason you want to perform the research. This is another example why some projects fail. You are send to one person and then you are sent to another person. This person proceeds to send you back to the initial person with the organization. The reason might be anything. This causes the project to be delayed and sometimes the deliverable is launched too late that the market already changed and doesn’t accommodate the deliverable anymore.
3. Making assumptions instead of getting informed
People in projects that typically are not involved in the technical and creation/implementation aspects of the project tend to make assumptions on how fast something can be created without actually trying to understand better how things work. And we all know what kind of mother ‘assumptions’ are..
4. Overly Complicated Designs and Overly Complicated PowerPoint Slides
A new project is started and is presented to stakeholders and other relevant parties. The project’s goal is to p.e. create some electronic system. This electronic system is displayed with very complicated slides that create such an intimidating atmosphere during the presentation that nobody dares to ask proper questions. To avoid getting embarrassed, some stakeholders don’t ask questions at all and fallback to number 3.
5. Unrealistic expectations
The last one, and in fact my favorite one, is that expectations that are set for a project are so big or vast that it’s impossible to deliver “as quick as possible” with “as little resources as possible”. This one, in my opinion, is the absolute killer of projects. Projects systematically fail to meet the expectations and values that the project executors initially aimed to create.