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Project Success: Top Ten Tips

Written by: Leslie Allan

Article Overview: All organizations run projects from time to time. Yet more than half of all projects started fail their objectives. Why is this so? Read this article to discover ten things you can do to improve the chances of success with your project.

Project Success: Top Ten Tips

Why do so many projects fail? Researchers regularly conduct studies to find out the leading causes of project failure. Some of the studies are in the public domain. You can look up studies by such groups as Gartner, Carnegie Mellon University and the Project Management Institute. The studies reveal a recurring theme. Here are some of the common causes they identify:

•poorly defined organizational objectives
•loose project sponsorship and executive leadership
•project manager untrained
•loose scope containment and project change control
•poorly defined requirements
•lack of consultation with key project stakeholders
•no risk management plan
•unrealistic project estimates

Do any of these look familiar to you? Do you recognize one or more as handicaps in your organization? I have summarized below the top ten things you can do to improve the chances of success of your projects.

1. Before you start your project, find a committed project sponsor who has sufficient clout in your organization. Your project sponsor will prove invaluable in helping you overcome organizational roadblocks as they arise.

2. Analyze who are your project’s key stakeholders and communicate with them throughout the project. Your stakeholders can make or break your project. Compile a stakeholder communication plan with the help of your project team and sponsor.

3. Get your sponsor and key stakeholders together to thrash out the measures of success of your project. How will you know if your project has succeeded? What are the key indicators of success? Get everyone on the same page from the outset.

4. Decide upfront the methodology you will use on your project. What project phases will the project proceed through? What will be the key go/no go decision points? What are the expected project outputs for each phase?

5. Draw up a project schedule that clearly allocates project tasks to team members. Identify which tasks depend on others for their successful completion. Communicate schedule progress regularly to all team members and to the project’s sponsor.

6. Make sure that project changes don’t get out of hand by reviewing and authorizing all proposed changes. Evaluate each proposed change for the impact on project cost, quality and schedule.

7. Do not let an unforeseen event sink your project. Find out what risks can threaten your project and build a risk mitigation strategy into your project plan. Issues will also arise from time to time, so you will need to keep track of these and communicate their impact to all concerned.

8. Decide at the start which documents your project will generate and when. For medium- and small-sized projects, keep documentation requirements to a manageable level without significantly increasing the risk to the project.

9. Once your project finishes, use the measures of success that you agreed at the start to evaluate project performance. Was it within budget? Was it on schedule? Did it produce what it was meant to produce, and at the required quality? What can you learn from this? Now report your project’s performance to your sponsor and the key stakeholders.

10. Follow up with the key stakeholders and your project team members and find out how they felt about the project. Was the project a success from their perspective? How did the project impact them personally? From this you will discover what went well and what did not go so well. Apply these lessons to your next project.


Successful projects do not just happen. They require structured planning, the right tools, insightful management and good interpersonal skills. Use the ten tips above to help make your next project a winner.

© Leslie Allan. All rights reserved.

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Article Tags: measures, methodology, phases, plan, project, project management, risk, schedule, scope, sponsor, stakeholders, team
Referred by: http://www.businessperform.com



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Why a project fails? - The top 10 factors that have driven failed projects are: 1. Project sponsors are often not committed to the objective. They have a lack of understanding of the project and are not actively involved in the project strategy and direction. 2. Some projects do not meet the strategic vision of the company. If business needs are not clearly defined, it will result in a project that does not add value to the bottom line or enhance business processes. 3. Projects are started for the wrong reasons. Some are initiated purely to implement new technology without regard for whether the technology is supportive of the business needs. The converse of this is a project that does not support existing technology, resulting in major scope creep and resultant expenditure. 4. Staffing is a reason for failure, eg not enough dedicated staff (project managers and project team members) allocated to projects. Project team members lack experience and do not have the required qualifications. Line-staff believe that they will be able to manage projects but are only 40% available to do so. Focus in this regard is not on the delivery of the project, but on the comfort zone of the project manager and his own time management. 5. Incomplete project scope. No clear definition of the project's benefits and the deliverables that will produce them. 6. A project plan that is non-existent, out of date, incomplete or poorly constructed and just not enough time and effort spent on project planning. 7. Project value management is not put into practice to evaluate baseline cost agreed during baseline transfer against actual costs spent at any given time. Project costs and financial do not form an integral part the project during execution. 8. Insufficient funding, and incorrect budgeting is still a major reason for projects not delivering their goals and objectives within the quality framework that was required, because projects always need to deliver yesterday within X budget. 9. No formal project management methodologies and best practices aligned to the company's specific needs are used to assist project performance. Companies do not want to invest in best of breed methodologies that will benefit the bottom line over a period, with projects delivered within budget. Companies do not recognise the value of using a methodology to support and enable them to record their own best practice project results for future reference, and to build a knowledge base within the company. 10. Not all project are going through a formal signed off process using a proper post mortem process to determine lessons learned and to build their own reference model for future use. A certificate signed off between sponsors and other third-parties will demonstrate project success but even that is quite seldom.


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