Surviving Failure

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Risk Management  

The biggest project that I ever worked on was ultimately a failure. I was working for an organization that had decided to invest in a whole new business function and we needed to build a software application, operational processes, support functions, internal processes and any number of other things. It was in a highly regulated industry so there was significant compliance work to do, and of course we also had to find customers who would give us work. It was a business-to-business model, so the number of customers needed was smaller--but the ability to get a commitment was also harder.

We secured a pilot customer fairly early on and started to move forward with them, and from a work perspective things were going fairly well. There were the inevitable teething problems, but we all felt fairly positive and were working on system upgrades and operational improvements that would be needed before a rollout to full production and operations. Unfortunately, the company at the time had experienced a change in economic fortunes for a few different reasons, so the amount of money available for investment was lower than originally planned. Then we had the chance to sign our first real client--and it was huge.

This led to a very difficult decision for the company--invest in scaling up the initiative to support this huge customer at a time when funds for investment were limited, …

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