Why Do Projects Fail?

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The failure of large, complex projects is legendary. Here’s what actually derails them — and what keeps them on track.

“Project fatigue” isn’t the term for what happens to a team that has worked long hours over months to execute a project that’s important to the company’s strategic objectives. No, project fatigue comes when that same team works long hours over months to execute that project a second, third, or even fourth time.

The failure of large, complex projects is legendary — but why do so many projects fail?

First, let’s admit it: they fail too often. Decades of research by the Standish Group put it in stark terms — roughly 70% of projects fail to fully meet their original goals, and only about a third finish on time, on budget, and with the features intended. What’s most sobering is how little those numbers have moved in twenty years, even as project tooling has grown far more sophisticated. The Project Management Institute estimates that poor project performance wastes around 11% of every dollar invested — trillions of dollars worldwide each year. That points to a lot of disappointment, a lot of wasted or underutilized resources, and a lot of incentive to learn how to do better.

What goes wrong? The two factors most likely to derail a project are:

• A lack of senior-level sponsorship.
• “Life” — all the ancillary factors that weren’t specifically anticipated in the planning phase.

“Life” indeed happens, and when top management hasn’t placed its support behind a project, the fabric of the project’s goals is readily torn by the shifting priorities that a company’s ongoing “life” engenders. Changes prompted by customers and vendors, team-member turnover, and even new innovations can be minor or daunting.

Of course, the death knell for a project is the big “crisis,” when sirens blare and the hatches are battened down. When crisis strikes, maintaining business as usual trumps planning for change and thinking ahead — the very things a project is built on. Often a project can withstand some initial pressure and endure some adjustments without losing its integrity. But absorbing too many stresses and events turns the original goals into something unrecognizable. By that time momentum is lost, and piecing the project back together becomes difficult for members to stomach.

What Is Meant by Senior-Level Commitment?

It seems like this should be intuitive, but often isn’t. Projects are initiated at many levels of the organization, and delegation practices mean senior management can’t be actively involved in every one. As with everything else a company does, however, the degree to which the mission and strategy set at the top is understood and shared down the line is a strong predictor of a project’s success.

Projects established as clear extensions of the mission and strategy enjoy senior management’s support, tacit or direct. When “life happens,” these projects are far more likely to survive intact.

The research bears this out. PMI consistently ranks clear goals and executive sponsorship among the top factors that separate successful projects from failed ones, and the Standish Group’s more recent CHAOS findings name inadequate executive sponsorship the single largest contributor to failure. Clear project definition at the executive level is what holds the core objectives together when unplanned events interfere — as they inevitably do.

Why Else Do Projects Fail?

Most of the other disruptive factors are functions of immature project management training and experience. Among the most commonly reported reasons for failure:

• The project wasn’t broken down into manageable tasks .
• Time, workload, member capabilities, and resource needs were poorly predicted.
• There was too much “white space” — key activities that simply weren’t thought of at the start.
• Disparate activities don’t come together in the end.

Each of these points to the absence of a proper process — one that imposes the necessary discipline on the project, the process, and the team. Project management training guides leaders and team members through a structured process that triggers consideration of every foreseeable factor, and that is built to flex for the obstacles that can’t be foreseen. Tellingly, the most recent research finds that better software alone hasn’t moved failure rates — what consistently separates high performers is disciplined process and skilled people, not tooling.

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