7 Causes of Project Failure

Brad Egeland is an IT/project management consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management and project management experience leading initiatives in manufacturing, government contracting, gaming and hospitality, retail operations, aviation and airline, pharmaceutical, start-ups, healthcare, higher education, not-for-profit, high-tech, engineering and general IT.

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How they affect the project can vary from company to company, project manager to project manager and project to project, but each of these seven factors — spanning budgets and resources to stakeholders and requirements — will have severe negative implications for the success of any project.

Best practices of project management are just that — best practices. They aren't guarantees of success or even necessarily measurable actions. Sometimes they don't even apply from project to project within the same industry or company, or with the same customer. You can repeat project management best practices until the cows come home and still end up with a failed project.

Just as there is no omniscient set of best practices, there is no all-inclusive set of reasons why projects fail. That simply isn't possible with the number of project types, industries, customers and stakeholders — along with ever-changing standards and measuring sticks of success and failure. Instead, let’s consider a reasonable list of seven common reasons projects often fail. These aren’t specific to industry or any other constraint, though they might be a bit more applicable to information technology than other segments.

1. Poorly planned budget.  A poorly planned budget will cause problems every time. In fact, you can manage a poorly planned budget well and still have …

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