Project Executive Group - Project Failuire and How to Avoid It

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Project Failure and How to Avoid It - Mar 2001

Project Management

Project Failure and How to Avoid It

Where to Find Project Failures
A statement I hear often from participants who take this Advanced Project Management Program is "Where are the
projects that failed?" This is usually made when the participants discover the cases in the Project Management
Casebook by Cleland used in the program are targeted primarily on "what went right" or "what was done right" or on
subjects like prudent project management, quality management, legal aspects, etc.

The majority of project cases provided in both casebooks may be viewed as 'self-serving' since authors are normally
required to obtain the project sponsor's input and usually their tacit approval to publish, especially in the
Construction Nightmares 'scenarios' which never point out that an architect can be a principle culprit in failure. The
facts are that many cases do not contain many examples of "what went wrong" or "what was done wrong." Problems
are not published nor advertised in most of these cases. Instead, the case providers paint positive scenarios. While
this in itself is worthwhile in building one's confidence that projects can and do "get done right," the missing elements
that are not discussed become suspect. If an author only highlights things that were done right then supposedly
those subjects not discussed were done wrong or inadequately.

Experienced project managers know that there are many things that go wrong in projects regardless how successful
they are in the planning and execution. In addition, the experienced project manager normally desires to learn from
others' mistakes in order to avoid making the same mistakes. This desire is noteworthy and smart, and seems to be
found predominately in those who have personally experienced problems and failures on projects themselves.

The desire should not only be to learn from other's mistakes, but to understand exactly what one needs to learn
from those mistakes. What exactly is the participant looking to learn? Is it a magic cure to avoid failure? Is it the
exposure to events that would prepare the participant for similar events so they are better prepared for an
unpleasant outcome? In my opinion, the participant needs to gain a "balanced view" and a "balanced approach" by
knowing both sides - what to do and what not to do. By having the ability to know "what to do right" and know "what
not to do" to prevent project failure, you will gain a professional competitive advantage held by very few. Let's move
forward in our exploration!

The most critical projects in the world can be found in the military. Yes, the military with its vast historical base and
research in the area of project disasters is the right place to look for an understanding of where failure may come
from. The military is ripe for learning due to two major reasons: first, it is the largest organizational behavior
laboratory in the world, and secondly, it is a project-based organization in wartime. Looking to wars with their many
military campaigns and battles (projects) are a good source for understanding. We will examine the sources/reasons
for failure in this section to prepare us for assessing causes of failure and diagnosing project failures in the program
cases.

By definition, a project is a temporary endeavor with a specified start time and a stated finish or finish goal. The
resources are constrained, decisions can be made while under stress, the environment surrounding a project can
change and therefore dramatically impact the project plan, etc. Military campaign battles are the area for the richest
learning. No lawsuits here! No regard for reputations of leaders or organizations hampers intense scrutiny given by
the historians and researchers! And no other projects in the world can compare with military ones due to costs and
the fact that lives are lost, sometimes in very large numbers.

In business, it is difficult to find good case studies on project failure. Due to many reasons, including lawsuits,
corporate reputations, and embarrassments, case studies of failed projects in detail are very difficult to find with
their facts laid bare. Military wartime programs with many projects can be and are subjected to intense scrutiny by
historians and researchers. These analysts move unbridled through the analyses - looking for answers in
understanding failures.

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More Than Understanding - The Ability to Diagnose
What the participant needs is more than an understanding of project failures. They need the ability to diagnose, the
ability to know what needs to be done by observing what wasn't done that contributed to project failure. They need
to know where failure comes from and how to prevent it.

In our study of cases, we will not only look into the Cleland cases to see "what went right" but more importantly, we
shall look at what they didn't bring out. What is missing? We will examine scenarios in the Construction Nightmares
book to ascertain causes of failure in projects and the legal or arbitrated side of issues. And, regardless of the lack
of either of these casebooks touching on the subject, we shall discuss how architects (in civil/infrastructure projects),
process engineers (in process industrial projects), politicians and others can, and do, contribute to failure by
excessive and incessant interference (under the guise of continuous improvement) during the final stages of
planning and during execution. .

PLEASE NOTE: In our study of failure I shall equate project management aspects against the military terminology for
better understanding as we learn how to determine the sources of failure, understand how to assess the source of
failure, how to use a diagnostic approach in assessment, and how to identify what should have happened to prevent
the failure. Useful tools for the participant to have in their career of continuous personal improvement in project
management. The goal here is to improve the participant's ability to pro-actively prevent project failures, improve
probabilities for success, and obtain better project outcomes by managing expectations.

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Creating a Methodology
By examining the military project sources of failure and developing a methodology for our own abilities to assess
sources of failure, we should be able to meet our goal of being able diagnose past projects effectively, and more
importantly, to prevent failures in our future projects.

Classic Elements of Failure in Projects

In Geoffrey Reagan's book, Great Military Disasters, he points out that the presence of all three elements usually
leads to disaster. The three elements are irresponsible politics, poor planning, and failures in command. So when we
look at a failed project, is there a presence of any or all of the above elements? If any of these elements are not
executed or considered they can often lead to disaster.

Failure in Command (Project Senior Management, Sponsors and Managers)

Unrealistic overconfidence. This is frequently associated with a leader's impetuous decisions, displays of personal
courage of a high order though of little relevance to the situation, a serious under-estimation of the environment
surrounding the project often stemming from ethnocentricity on the part of the leader, and action taken purely with
the intention of forwarding the leader's personal ambitions.

Clausewitz has called war 'the province of uncertainty' and it is the task of the leader to reduce this uncertainty as
much as he can before committing resources in a project endeavor. This uncertainty should save a leader from
making the mistake of being too confident, preventing him/her from under-estimating the real situation, or
committing resources impetuously.

Timidity. It is hardly surprising that just as the stresses of command leadership drive some to behave rashly through
over-confidence and contempt for the project's environment, so there will be others who show timidity and feelings
of inferiority. The consequence can be failure as disastrous as that stemming from impetuosity.

Personal inadequacies. It has been said that much historical writing overlooks the fact that men have feelings, needs
and physical senses. It is therefore necessary to examine various personal defects which, aside from stupidity, have
contributed to incompetence through the ages. It is a problem of any system which depends on promotion by
seniority rather than merit that men can achieve positions of considerable power and responsibility at an age when
their facilities are diminishing in effectiveness.

· Tactical inadequacies.

· Failure to communicate.

· Wastage of human resources.

Failure in Planning (Project Planners, Developers, Proposal Managers)

· Clinging to tradition.

· Intelligence failures.

· Unsuitable equipment

· Welfare failures.

Failure in Politics (Internal Various Levels, On and Off Team, External)

· Alienation of allies.

· Policy failures.

· Confusion of military and political objectives.

· Failure of the propaganda weapon.

Understanding Disasters (Project Failures)
In the book, Military Misfortunes: An Anatomy of Failure in War by Eliot Cohen and John Gooch, the authors suggest
the exploration of military misfortune by looking at the five explanations most commonly offered by historians trying
to account for defeat and disaster on the field of battle. They offer the concept that as we look at each one in turn,
we shall see that its deficiencies outweigh its merits - often considerably.

Following the examination of battles, we shall turn aside briefly from battles and battlefields to look at general
explanations that have been offered to account for civil disasters and business failures. Analysts of civil - as opposed
to military - failures have recently begun to look at their subjects from a new perspective: how organizations can
misfunction in unintended and unexpected ways. With this new perspective in mind, we shall develop a general
theory of military misfortune and lay out a taxonomy of five types of military failure.

1. The Man in the Dock.

2. The Man on the Couch.

3. Collective Incompetence and the Military Mind.

4. Institutional Failure.

5. Cultural Failure.

Lessons From Civilian Life

· Disaster Theory.

· Failure in Business

· Men, Organization and Systems.

Theory of Military Misfortune

· Simplicity and Complexity.

· "Simple" Failures.

· "Complex" Failures.

Analyzing Failure

· Introduction.

· The Politics of Failure.

· The Dogma of Responsibility

· Military History and the Study of Defeat.

· Social Science and the Study of Surprise.

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In Search of Method: Clausewitzian Kritik
Let it be clear at the outset that the analytic task faced by the student of military misfortune is formidable in the
extreme. He or she faces the usual difficulty of military history, rendering some sense out of the chaos that is a
battlefield.

Despite the plethora of documentation generated by soldiers and their organizations - memoirs, regimental histories,
not to mention war diaries, and after-action reports - the reality of battle is often obscure, and the forces for
dissimulation, be they conscious or unintended, potent. This is, of course, trebly true when speaking of disaster,
when the urge for bureaucratic self-protection by means of the creation of spurious or misleading documents can be
overwhelming.

But quite apart from the problem of evidence - eyewitnesses who either forget spontaneously or choose to do so,
war diaries written months after the event by harried junior officers, reports concealed for reasons of security - is
the problem of procedure. Even in cases where the historian's normal methods of evaluating and cross-checking can
work, how should we set about thinking through particular military failures? Perhaps the best guide for the analysis
of military misfortunes comes from the greatest of all students of war, Carl von Clausewitz, and particularly from
book 2 of his masterwork, On War. In this section On War, Clausewitz discusses his concept of "critical analysis," or
Kritik, which forms the base for his approach to the study of war. Kritik supports the development of military theory,
which is the subject of his book.

Kritik has three steps: the discovery of facts, the tracing of effects to causes, and the investigation and evaluation of
means. Clausewitz argued against what we have called horizontal history - the study of war at only one level, be it
that of tactics, strategy, technology, or whatever. Rather, he believed that military questions must be studied at all
levels because of the interaction among them. Thus, "a means may be evaluated not merely with respect to its
immediate end: that end itself should be appraised as a means for the next and highest one…Every stage in this
progression obviously implies a new basis for judgment. That which seems correct when looked at from one level
may, when viewed from a higher one, appear objectionable."

Clausewitz's approach was the systematic study not only what actually occurred, but in the investigation of what
might have happened, the study of not only of the means that were used, but the means that might have been used.
By studying a few relatively recent episodes in detail rather than studying dozens in a more superficial way, we can
gain a much better understanding.

Clausewitz suggested a method: intensive historical case study, a willingness to think through hypothetical actions
systematically and multilevel analysis. Equally, and perhaps more important, he offered a mental approach, a 'cast
of mind conducive to the study of failure'. Clausewitz helps us realize that our chief concern is not the awarding of
demerits or prizes to defeated or successful commanders (project managers, sponsors, senior management), not
deciding whether a decision to relieve them from or retain them in their positions was just, but to discover why
events took the turn they did.

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The Analytical Matrix
Failure in Command (Project Leaders, Sponsors, Senior Management)

Using Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) as an example of failure in command, you must first determine the critical
failures then select the chief layers of command. After doing so, we can represent the problem "graphically." This is
an additional tool for analysis (beyond the "fishbone" diagrams commonly used for cause and effect). (OVERHEAD)

To emphasis the analytical matrix technique, we shall examine the following:

Failure to Learn

American Antisubmarine Warfare in 1942. ("OH" = OVERHEAD IN CLASS)

Failure to Anticipate

Israel Defense Forces on the Suez Front and the Golan Heights, 1973 (OH)

Failure to Adapt

The British at Gallipoli, August 1915 (OH)

Aggregate Failure - Defeat in Korea

Defeat of the American Eighth Army in Korea, 1959 (OH)

Catastrophic Failure - The Fall of France

The French Army and Air Force, May-June, 1940 (OH)

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A Note on Cause-and-Effect Diagrams
A cause-and-effect diagram, also know as a "fishbone" or "Ishikawa chart," is a powerful problem-solving tool used
to examine factors that may influence a given situation. A cause-and-effect helps to highlight all the causes of a
problem and to identify the root causes before trying to solve it.

Let's use the example above - the wheels are falling off the wagon.

State the problem. Begin with a clear statement of the problem or desired effect. In this case, the wheels fall off the
wagon. Box this and then draw a line from the box to the left which forms the "spine" of the fish.

Identify major causes. Now identify the major causes of the effect. These can be skills, procedures, information
systems, authority, or any other relevant cause.

Good Rule of Thumb: The Five Ms
When considering the causes of the effect, the five Ms are a good rule of thumb: Man (people), Machine
(technology), Method (process), Material (structure), Milieu (environment).

For each major cause, draw a diagonal line (arrow) from the top or bottom of the work area to the spine. For those
major causes you identify, draw boxes at the end of the diagonal lines (leaning left) and label each of these.

Identify primary causes and sub-causes. From each major cause, identify and label them on horizontal lines
radiating from each cause until you have enough detail. Ultimately you will have a complete list of causes and sub-
causes.

A note on "getting to the root cause." When you are searching for the root cause, it is helpful to try to ask yourself
"why" five times. For example.

1. Why does A happen? Because of B.

2. Why does B happen? Because of C.

3. Why does C happen? Because of D.

4. Why does D happen? Because of E.

5. Why does E happen? Because of F. This is the 'root' cause.

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Pathways to Misfortune
An exercise such as the one on Pearl Harbor above, though it may oversimplify some of the relationships between
failures, is a handy device for analyzing military misfortunes. If, after looking at the charts, we draw arrows
indicating relationships between various failures, we can define pathways to misfortune. We notice several things
about the resulting picture. First, the critical pathway to misfortune comes in the column headed Coordination - it is
through the failure of coordination at levels three through five that American forces found themselves at such low
levels of military alert. Then we note a secondary pathway from box 2.1 thorough box 3.1 to box 4.2 - the
misleading nature of the warning sent out at a rather higher level, and to liability to misinterpretation by the rather
literal-minded commander on the scene.

It is in the first pathway - that stemming from failure to coordinate, however - that we may find the most important
explanation of the Pearl Harbor disaster.

The Missing Dimension of Strategy
By dissecting military misfortune in the way demonstrated above, we find our attention drawn repeatedly to what
one might call "the organizational dimension of strategy." Military organizations and the states that develop them,
periodically assess their own ability to handle military threats (does this sound like something that the Bush
administration has emphasized on taking over in January, 2001?). When they do so they tend to look at that which
can be quantified: the number of troops, the quantities of ammunition, the readiness rates of key equipment, the
amount of transport, and so on. Rarely, however, do they look at the adequacy of their organization as such, and
particularly high level organization., to handle these challenges. Yet as Pearl Harbor and other cases suggest, it is in
the deficiency of organizations that the embryo of misfortune develops. And it is in the 'varieties of organizational
dysfunction' that we must be concerned about.

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The Program's Focus: Project Failure Analysis and Trap Prevention

Failure to "Learn."

Throughout this program you will find lessons learned. You will be asked to review these "lessons learned" and add
more of your own as you progress through your career. You will be asked to link these lessons learned in the case
analyses. This is fertile ground for establishing a foundation so you cannot fall into the failure trap of "failure to
learn."

Failure to "Anticipate."

Throughout this program you will find means to anticipate problems. You will be asked to continually ask yourself
and others, "What can go wrong?" You will be exposed to many tools for screening, risk assessments and risk
management. You will be encouraged to learn and use those tools to anticipate quantitatively and qualitatively the
project's risks and uncertainties. In doing so, you will better anticipate what can go wrong , establish contingency or
mitigation for each risk, and establish a solid foundation for the project so you cannot fall into the trap of "failure to
anticipate."

Failure to "Adapt."

Throughout this program you will find project leadership and real change management emphasized. The program
stresses the importance of "real change leadership" in creating adaptive project teams and organizations. The reality
of a continually changing environment surrounding any project requires a high level of adaptability for project
managers, their teams and organizations. This is a critical capability that must be put in place in organizations and
projects today. In doing so you will establish a foundation so you cannot fall into the trap of "failure to adapt."

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I look forward to seeing you in the next Advanced Project Management program. - Paul

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