Most of us like to discuss  & talk about successful projects and things we should do/adapt in order to be successful or deliver successful projects*. Isn’t it? Afterall successful projects are what we are all after. :) However, Many times we end up being part of projects which sometimes don’t deliver the results as expected and end up in failures :(.

I’ve been thinking to pen my thoughts on this topic for quite some time and finally got time ( …or I am less procrastinator at the time of writing this blog). In my Agile coach hat, I had the chance to conduct numerous retrospectives of various teams across the IT department, who have delivered small to large projects. In all the retrospectives, there were few items hanging on the top of the list and were common in all the projects which were not so successful. Below mentioned are some of those common factors,  and lack of one or more resulted in projects which didn’t meet business needs;

• Communication: If not all but most of the business today have outsourced a lot of work to other companies which results in onshore/offshore/nearshore model. Most of the projects being executed have this set up which results in a lot of communication gap due to time differences, cultural difference and perceptions. With so many technological advancements and new communications tools, this is still on top of the list.

 

• Not understanding the Why part of the project: Unless and until you and your team doesn’t fully understand the Why part of the project and/or business need, the project is destined for failure. It is very important that the whole team fully understand the Why part of requirement before they start. They should be able to see the birds point of view and understand where they fit in this view & what is required of them.

 

• No Transparency: ‘Too much information is dangerous but too little is worse’. Of all the colleagues, I spoke with during the retros, 1-1’s and interviews they mentioned that they were not fully aware of the long-term project goals and were only involved in limited part of the project which limited their capacity to deliver fully. Keeping all the people on the same page is vital to the team’s success. All teammates (employees/consultants etc.)  should be well aware of all the important factors affecting the project.

 

• No Trust among team members: With the above mentioned distributed team set up and people working from offshore/onshore/nearshore models, it is highly important that the team has a high level of trust factor between themselves. It helps a lot for the team to discuss issues and/or ask for help freely from each other irrespective of where they are located. The team’s having high trust factor also have a lot of fun while working on the projects.

 

Apart from these already known and easy to talk, but hard to practice factors, there are some other factors which have not been mentioned here( …..it can be another blog), most of them can be grouped under technical factors. But at end of the day, technical factors/incompetencies rarely led to project failures. We are not working on rocket science after all, isn’t it :). Well, some of you do but for everything else, we do have google.com

Are there more similar factors (apart from the ones mentioned above..) which you have faced in the not so successful projects you ever worked on? Do comment below:)

*  Projects – Projects within the IT department of a company.
** There are umpteen nos. of ways in which above factors can be improved, but I would keep them for another blog and will stick to KISS.

Love & Peace//C.