Coming Back Strong from Project Failure

Failed projects damage financial status, discourage creativity and growth, bruise egos, and set back careers. Good news: with time, failure can lead to positive outcomes. Here are some benefits that come from project failure.

• Learning opportunities. Say an organization spends time and money upgrading an information system, only to have it shut down before producing usable deliverables. The organization learned two significant lessons from internal and external reviews. First, some people didn’t understand what the new IT system would do and how it would do it. Second, diligence in evaluating the business case fell short. No one researched whether project cost and staffing estimates were realistic before funding the project. Based on these findings, the organization changed some behaviors, which lead to better management on future projects.
• Better process discipline. The organization’s project failure also highlighted teams not adhering to good business practices. The business case issue triggered additional reviews, which identified the same problem in other areas. Tthe organization made sweeping changes to increase process discipline, which improved the integrity of initiatives and results delivered to customers and shareholders.
• Enhanced listening. Under business pressure, project sponsors can become overly optimistic and desperate to deliver outcomes. As a result, they might not listen to concerns being raised by staff members. Failures can prompt sponsors and stakeholders to reflect on team members’ concerns and give them more weight in future project decisions.
• More effective handling of assumptions. Assumptions are part of every project. How long they remain assumptions makes a difference in project success. For the best results, assumptions should be evaluated early in the project lifecycle to determine whether they are accurate. When assumptions aren’t accurate, you make them the basis for robust risk management plans, which improve project success.
• More team synergy and determination. After a failure, demoralized project teams can be invigorated when they hear about process changes they can implement to be successful and get support from senior managers.  People don’t want to be associated with failure. When they are, the best way to rebuild team morale and synergy is having a chance for redemption. That desire for redemption creates a lot of latent energy toward making a project successful.

Think about the last time you experienced project failure. How did your organization react and was it effective? Do you think the approaches described above would improve results in future projects?

For more about learning from project failure, check out Todd Dewett’s Learning from Failure course.

Coming Up

Be on the lookout for the updated version of my course, Learning Microsoft Project. Get up to speed quickly with Microsoft Project. Learn just the essentials you need to know to create projects, add tasks, assign resources, and run reports.

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