Project Failure and Ways To Minimize the Risks

               Project management is certainly not an easy task as it requires great vision, excellent planning, and great collaboration among stakeholders, customers and project members. Therefore, it is not unusual to believe that almost  60% of the IT projects fail due to budget overruns, poor requirements gathering process, unrealistic project goals and poor project management skills. In order to be considered a project successful, it should deliver the quality product within the estimated budget and deadline. If a project deviates severely from the estimated budget and deadline, it will eventually lead to project failure. For this reason,  projects should be carried out under triple constraints - cost, time and scope. Triple constraints mainly emphasizes that projects must be delivered within cost and time, projects meeting its scope and customer quality requirements.

Below are some of the guidelines that could help to minimize the risk of project failure:

·        Setup realistic project goals. Therefore, while setting objectives for any project, time, available resource and budget should be kept into considerations

·        Enhance communication among the teams involved in the project. Most of the time, communication gap is the main factor for project failure.

·        Report properly about the project's status on a regular basis

·        Define roles and responsibilities of all teams & team members  involved in the project

·        Take action right away when there is a sign of disorganization (don't wait)

               I am reluctant to put clear and well defined requirements in the pointers above because with majority of the companies adopting agile/SCRUM and with user requirements changing frequently, I don't believe it is possible to have well defined requirements like in waterfall before a project is executed in agile. Of course, it is crucial for product owners to interact with customers and stakeholders to collect the requirements as well as get the feedbacks on a regular basis. Based on that scrum master would then create user backlog stories.

               Many people often believe that switching to agile methodology from waterfall will help to eliminate the risks associated with the project failure. Comparing agile with waterfall is like comparing oranges with apples because both of these software development methodologies have pros and cons associated with them. I won't go into details about waterfall and agile methodology now since they are not the scope of this post. I will go into their details in my future post.