Читать книгу Project Management Essentials For Dummies, Australian and New Zealand Edition - Portny Stanley E., Nick Graham - Страница 5

By following a sound approach to the project, you avoid many pitfalls that continue to contribute to, or cause, project failure on a mind-boggling scale. You may ask why, if good ways of doing things are out there, people ignore them and then see their projects fail. Good question. People make the same project mistakes repeatedly, and they’re largely avoidable.

The following list looks at the main causes of project failure. The list makes for depressing reading, but gives a good background against which to contrast successful project management and the approach in this book.

✓ Lack of clear objectives: Nobody’s really sure what the project is about, and even fewer agreed with 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 resources. Neither did those managers exercise normal management supervision as they routinely do in their 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, that things run out of control.

✓ No clear progress milestones: 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 the Project Plan are superficial and understate both what the project needs to deliver and the resources needed to deliver it. 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: Many projects fail because of communication breakdown, which can stem from unclear roles and responsibilities, and from poor senior management attitudes.

✓ 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 deliver by the required time, 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.

That’s ten reasons for failure, but you can probably think of a few more. The interesting thing about these problems is that avoiding them is, for the most part, actually not that difficult.