a compilation from LinkedIn forum IASA: The Global IT Architect Association

Top 3 Reasons why Projects Fail
Focusing on reasons why the project fail, it is important to be focused on the reasons of SUCCESSFUL ACCOMPLISHMENT the project:
1. Meet the deadline
2. Meet the budget
3. Meet the functionality
4. Without major bugs
5. Well accepted by users
6. Deliver business values (ROI)
7. Complete & updated documentation

On the other hand, why projects fail?
The project team, the suppliers, the customers and other stakeholders can all provide a source of failure, but the most common reasons for project failure are rooted in the project management process itself and the aligning of IT with organizational cultures (Tilmann and Weinberger, 2004).
The failure may be identified in estimation mistakes (poor planning, vague requirements, or unclear project goals and objectives, and project ever-changing requirements during the project development as key factors in project failures.

The following list the primary causes for the failure of complex IT projects:

• Poor planning
• Unclear goals and objectives / Vague requirements
• Objectives changing during the project / Project creep
• Unrealistic time or resource estimates
• Lack of executive support and user involvement
• Failure to communicate and act as a team
• Inappropriate skills

PLANNING
Without adequate planning, it is difficult to really understand what it will take to complete a project successfully. Lack of planning leads to inadequate preparation, unexpected problems, and poor execution of milestone tasks.

Poor planning is a worst practice because:

• If you don’t have written plans, you are using your memory to keep track of things, what is unreliable and dangerous. Planning is an excellent tool for getting things out in the open. Good planning forces you to think about your projects before you set about doing it and to put your thoughts down on "paper". This alone can help you prevent many project failures and delays.

• Without plans, it is difficult—sometimes even impossible—to get a clear picture of all the things that you are working on and what still needs to be done. ROAD MAP Planning allows you to identify all your projects and tasks and gain a much better understanding of what it will really take to complete them. Without planning, you won’t have a clear idea of what you need to do and you won’t be able to prioritize your time properly. How can you prioritize your time if you don’t even understand what you are trying to accomplish? When you don’t have clear priorities, you are much more vulnerable to distractions and unexpected events.

• Lack of preparation - Imagine that you and your friends are going on a two-week trip to the wilderness. Would you do any planning? Of course you would. You plan so that you are fully prepared for the trip: you know where you are going, how to get there, how to get back, what obstacles to avoid, what type of terrain you will be facing, how many and what kind of supplies you need to make your journey, etc. Reasonable people would never venture out into the wilderness without proper planning and preparation because it could easily cost them their lives. The location and duration of the trip makes a big difference in the type and level of preparation that is required. Lack of adequate preparation in your own projects can easily cause them to fail or fall deep behind schedule.

• Lack of risk management - Without proper planning, it is difficult to anticipate and avoid major problems and risks. Without actively monitoring and avoiding these risks, they can easily sidetrack or even cause your project to fail.
Planning is one of the most important activities in time management—it has been estimated that every minute spent planning can save three in execution—and yet it is one of the least practiced.
In fact, for most people, this worst practice is not poor planning, but no planning at all.

Requirement changes during the project development
Many project managers had the feeling that their IT project features and requirement would never stop growing. Often the "initial" requirements for the software to be developed are changed more than one time after the development began. The Software and similar IT projects suffer from two classical problems in project management:
* Scope creep
* Feature creep.
Scope creep refers to uncontrolled and unexpected changes in customer desires and expectations as a project development progress, while feature creep refers to uncontrolled introduction of new of features to a system with a wrong assumption that one small feature will add nothing to cost, schedule or complexity.
Some Project managers do not understand project trade-offs, and it will result in not making correct decisions regarding objectives and priorities on the basis of rational insight.
Often staying committed to the initial requirements will result in failure when the requirements of a project changes during the newly arrised issues which have not been initially envisioned. So some development flexibility and development roadmap milestone adjustments are often required.


Top 3 Reasons why Projects Fail?
Please share top 3 reasons which you have encountered / heard in your career which have led to Project failures.

1. Weak mandate of management across the organization, with respect to a project's planning and execution
2. Absence of thorough impact analysis
3. People management and communication issues
• In my view the top three reason of project failure are:
* Scope definition issues
* Lack of stake holders commitment
3- Incompetent team
1. Poor management - manufacturing-based management strategies
2. Poor management - not listening to technical experts on planning decisions
3. Poor management - teamicidal actions (take your pick from Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister)
The most successful activities are usually those done without management oversight.
1. Poor communication between teams
2. Ambiguous requirements - linked to 1
3. Unrealistic deadlines - linked to 2
1) Lack of communication within the team
2) Lack of ownership
3) Lack of clear goals, lack of leadership.
1) Poor communication between client and team
2) Lack of Teamwork
3) Poor Project Management
4) Under estimated deadlines
5) Lack of technical expertise
6) Unstated or unclear goals to every member of the team
7) Lack of responsibility and ownership

1. Wrong understanding
2. Wrong project
3. Wrong approach
4. Wrong team
5. Too many/much resources
• I think this page give us a good conclusion:
http://www.projectperfect.com.au/info_it_projects_fail.php
•Poor planning
•Unclear goals and objectives
•Objectives changing during the project
•Unrealistic time or resource estimates
•Lack of executive support and user involvement
•Failure to communicate and act as a team
•Inappropriate skills
• It seems that most failure reasons listed or described here are, in most cases, more symptoms than causes. Why does a project get poor planning, unclear goals and objectives, changing objectives, unrealistic time or resource estimates, lack of executive support and user involvement, failure to communicate and act as a team, inappropriate skills, inappropriate tools, bad management, lack of stake holders commitment, etc.? They all seem to confirm that it is the wrong project, in the wrong context, with the wrong motivations, or else, why would it be so bad? It is quite possible that some resources are not good for a project but if the project and its motivations are right, there should be enough good resources to pick up the slack. Why would a project requirements exceed available resources by so much that it fails and that this could not be foreseen, if not because it was the wrong project, planned for the wrong reasons? Of course, too much/many resources can also corrupt any otherwise valid project or set of resources...
1. Poor Management that include Project management and People management
2. Poor Analysis that include Risk, Stakeholder, Risk, Scope, Cost, Schedule
3. Poor communication that include effective and efficient
• Plenty of good comments, but one thing that's missing is a notion of project complexity. There's some industry data floating around (I think in McConnell's "Software Estimation Demystified") where he shows that > 50% of projects deemed "highly complex" fail. #s for REALLY complex things like ERP implementations can have have failure rates > 80% (depending on how you measure them).
If you want to succeed, try and simplify what you are trying to do.
Brendan Healy • My responses to the question would be communication, scoping, ownership, accountability and poor management. As architects we must ask why it seems so hard to "communicate" as this in my opinion is the root of most failures. The challenge appears to be to communicate the correct information to the correct individuals and most important get agreement - don’t just assume that because you have sent an email that someone agrees. As architects we must be forceful in our messages and bring everyone along in the project – where we see an issue we must raise concerns – we are part of the leadership and ultimately response for failures.
• Lack of
1) Communication
2) Transparency
3) Cadence of accountability
1.Poor alignment of Solution with Problem - ie design of solution doesn't address the problem.
2. Poor stakeholder buyin or demand - nice idea, interesting, but nobody really wants it or make it enough of a priority.
3. Missed timeliness - (great) product delivered too late or at wrong time, makes it useless.
4. (related to 2) Lack of *real* customer - nice sales driven idea, but no customer really wants or needs it, so it can never be delivered.
Otherwise there are lots of technical, planning, scoping and other resource issues that influence how and whether a project can ever be delivered. But the key factors in failures are more due to misalignment, or wrong solution to wrong problem, or wrong solution for wrong customer.
Top reasons for project failure? Depends on what you call failure. There are a hundred definitions of what it means to fail.
If failure means "inability of a customer to accept delivery of expected benefits on time and on budget" then I'd have to list the top three reasons to be:
a) poor relationship between expected benefits and solution that is supposed to deliver them (poor alignment, poor design, infeasible choices, design-by-politics)
b) poor preparation of the execution team to deliver (unqualified staff, poor project mgmt, under-resourced, over-stretched, poor communication within team, poor relationship to client), and
c) poor preparation of the customer to use the resulting system (unprepared users, poor flexibility management, poor resource planning, conflicts with other projects, poor technical infrastructure, etc).
1. Communication
2. Putting the right people in the project
3. Lack of fail-safe planning in every task


Conclusions

The past failure need not discourage project managers from future efforts. Past examples of IT project failures gives us the opportunity to point to the relevant lessons that can be derived from recognizing areas where IT projects is more likely to fail.
Project managers can position themselves to reduce the possibility for project failure by considering the following recommendations:
* Project Management Software Make sure to plan before starting the development or implementation.
* Pay attention to tasks in the critical path.
* Set up the necessary processes to calculate and inform the risk.
* Ensure that the IT project has clear objectives.
* Understand project trade-offs when making decisions regarding objectives change.
* Use the duration instead of the time on task to estimate schedule.
* Avoid using linear approximation when estimating time or resources.
* Get the support from the executive management and ask them to be open if they have any reservations about the project.
* Ensure and communicate regular about the progress, even if it seems invisible.
* Require that users participate in design and implementation of your project
* Make sure you have the appropriate planning, communication, and technology skills.
These recommendations, along with solid project management, can reduce the risk that an IT project fails.