Projects Don't Fail--People Do!

I know, it may be semantics. We talk about project failures. And maybe we know deep down inside that it is really people who fail, but I think it is worth making that understanding explicit, rather than implicit. Because if it remains implicit, then it is very easy to bypass accountability for failure. And the people who fail should be accountable for the failure, not some abstract entity called "The Project."

Someone at NASA once said that "Projects are perfectly planned to fail from the beginning." (I don't know who said it, but she/he should get a commendation for calling it to our attention.)

Let me give you an example. A team at a software company (all will remain anonymous, to protect the guilty) was given a project to do, and asked how long it would take. They were told that they had 10 programmers to work on it. They estimated that they would need about 20,000 programming hours to do the job, so with 10 programmers, it would take about 2,000 hours of calendar time, or roughly one year. So they optimistically announced that the job would be complete in a year.

Nobody bothered to actually create a proper work breakdown structure, much less a critical path schedule. They just launched the project. After all, what's important is getting the work done, and planning does not produce code.

Then the fun began.

The project leader discovered that a couple of programmers assigned to the job didn't know how to program in C+. The wife of another programmer--who was a critical player on the team--was experiencing a problem pregnancy, so he was away from the job a significant amount of time. Then there were technical difficulties caused by an unclear definition of exactly what the software was supposed to do (unclear vision, specs, and so on). To make a long story short--a very long story--the project took three years to complete, not the one year that was originally announced.

You could fill volumes of books with examples like this. It is not a cliche to say that, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Yet there are many managers who believe that planning is a waste of time. They also fall into the trap of saying, "We don't have time to plan--we have to get the job done." What they don't realize is that, the tighter the time frame, the more important a plan becomes, because you can't afford to waste any time at all, and only a good plan will help you minimize rework and false starts.

Before he became president, General Dwight Eisenhower said, "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." He was absolutely right. Your plan may be made invalid because of circumstances beyond your control, but the process of planning will usually enable you to recover much faster than if you were just "winging it" to begin with.

As a general guideline, one hour spent planning will save you three hours of execution time, and a corollary is that bypassing a few days of planning can easily cost you several weeks of execution time.

Projects fail because people fail to plan and execute them correctly.

Slange,

Jim Lewis