Project Failure as a Scapegoat for Organizational Failure (Part 2)

Majeed is a business transformation manager with over 25 result-driven years of international business improvement experience. He has been an active volunteer within PMI communities since 2005, and his main passion and focus is on ethics and authentic leadership in project management.

  Agile   Business Analysis   Change Management   Governance   Leadership   Lessons Learned   Organizational Project Management   Portfolio Management   Strategy  

Organizations often talk of project management failure and put us in a vicious cycle of cause/effect analysis loops. The problem is that we look for the cause of project management failure where the light is--and not in the dark spot where the true issue is. This three-part series helps to uncover some key underlying and recurring sources of confusion within organizations. Part 1 looked at decision-making dilution; we now turn our attention to methodological and structural confusion.

Methodological and structural confusion

1. Approach vs. objective. When I look back at business evolution over the years, there have been several extreme cases of exaggerating trends related to use of ISO, TQM, Y2K, internal clients versus external clients, an “open bar” organization cost mentality to cost containment as a best practice, PMP versus PRINCE2, office landscape versus open office, and now more recently waterfall versus agile for IT projects. For sure, there will be new movements coming.

I shudder at the use of the term “waterfall” when applied to project management. Waterfall to me has always meant an SDLC, where you have feasibility, analysis, design, development, testing, install and so on. Waterfall has only ever been applied to project management since agilists have started doing it. There is nothing in A Guide to the Project Management Body of …

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