"Top 10 Reasons Why Projects Fail"
Hannah Phieffer
Scope Creep
Scope Creep: Refers to uncontrolled changes or continuous growth in a project's scope.
When it happened to me: During project four, our group thought that if we saved as much money as we could, then we would be fine. As we were working on it, we figured out that we had to come as close to the budget as possible to make the highest score, so we had to start trying to buy more things last minute, and the project became a lot bigger than it was supposed to be. This caused the quality of our project to go down.
Poor Communications
A lot of projects will end up failing because the Project Manager is almost like a ghost during the length of the project. Group members may only know their Project Managers through the phone or over a loud-speaker. Project Managers should be present within the group all the time and always communicating with their members to make sure that they understand everything and can have questions answered if need be.
No Risk Management
Every project has a set of risks that go to it, and a group is wrong if they think that nothing can go wrong. Groups will fail in the execution of a project if a risk actually happens and they cannot manage it or fix it in a timely and costly manner. Members should plan for mistakes to happen so they will have the resources to fix it if those should happen.
The Accidental Project Manager
If a member within the project is noticingly succeeding at what they are doing, they may get promoted to Project Manager. This may be a problem because Project Managers are trained in their own separate field, and if a person within the group gets promoted, then they may lack a lot of the training needed to work as a Project Manager.
Monitoring and Controlling
Many projects will fail because a schedule will be made and it will rarely be updated, causing a fluster in the time allotted to complete tasks. A schedule should be updated regularly to avoid stress and running over the time given for the project to be completed.
Unreliable Estimates
Having unreliable estimates happens when team members do not give an accurate estimate on how long it will take to complete the tasks in the project. Because of this, the project may run over time if tasks are not given enough time to be completed. Groups should communicate together to find out how long everything will take, and give a little bit more time than needed to complete each task to as not to rush during the execution of the project.