Voices on Project Management

By Peter Tarhanidis, Ph.D.

Many leaders accept failure as part of their learning to enhance their future and mature outcomes. At the beginning of a new year, we must reflect on the past year’s successes and failures. Reflecting on project failures in 2024 offers leaders valuable insights to foster success in 2025. Understanding these challenges, supported by data and examples, is crucial for leaders aiming to enhance project outcomes in 2025.

Here are some notable quotes and perspectives on failure and resilience:

• Failure as the stepping stone to success: "Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly." — Robert F. Kennedy.
• The power of perseverance: "The secret of life is to fall seven times and to get up eight times." — Paulo Coelho
• The need to take risks: "Risk is not to be evaluated in terms of the probability of success but by the value of the goal." — Ralph D. Winter

Leaders should reflect on 2024 project failures with a focus on identifying root causes, assessing systemic issues, and implementing actionable lessons. Below are examples of challenges organizations and leaders faced or continue to struggle with:

1. Poor resource management: Inefficient allocation of resources led to project delays and budget overruns. TeamStage’s 2024 survey cites 60% of respondents identified poor resource management as their biggest challenge. Prosymmetry illustrates this impact; the Denver International Airport's automated baggage handling system faced severe delays and budget overruns due to inadequate resource allocation and management.
2. Lack of defined project management methodologies: The absence of standardized processes resulted in inconsistent project outcomes. Plaky’s 2024 survey indicates that 42% of project managers do not follow a defined project management methodology, making their projects 15% less likely to meet goals and stay within budget. Prosymmetry 2024 shares an example of when the Ford Edsel project failed due to the absence of a clear project management methodology, resulting in misaligned objectives and market misjudgment.
3. Unrealistic deadlines: Setting unattainable timelines leads to compromised quality and team burnout. Tempo 2024 states that 31% of project managers reported unrealistic deadlines as a top challenge. A key highlight noted by the Project Management blog is when the FBI's Virtual Case File project was abandoned after four years and $170 million spent, primarily due to setting unattainable deadlines that led to incomplete and faulty deliverables.
4. Insufficient budget: Unsurprisingly, underfunded projects struggled to procure necessary resources, affecting deliverables. Exploding Topics 2024 survey notes that 17% of project managers cited insufficient budget as a significant challenge. ProjectManager blog cites the California DMV's IT modernization project was canceled after $135 million was spent over nine years, largely due to chronic underfunding and budget mismanagement.
5. Poor project quality: Without the voice of the customer, deliverables failed to meet stakeholder expectations, necessitating costly revisions. This was noted by the Exploding Topics 2024 survey by 13% of project managers, who identified poor project quality as a major issue. ProjectManager blog notes the Healthcare.gov website launch in 2013 suffered from numerous glitches and downtime due to inadequate testing and quality assurance, leading to a poor user experience.

2025 Strategies to Ensure Success

1. Implement defined project management methodologies: Adopt a standardized framework like agile or waterfall to provide clear guidelines and improve project outcomes. Tempo 2024 confirms projects are 15% more likely to meet goals and stay within budget when following a defined methodology.
2. Set realistic deadlines: Engage stakeholders in setting achievable timelines based on resource availability and project scope. Leaders will reduce the risk of team burnout and maintain quality standards.
3. Ensure adequate budget allocation: Conduct thorough cost estimations during the planning phase to secure necessary funding. Leaders can prevent resource shortages and maintain project momentum.
4. Enhance project quality: Implement quality assurance processes and continuous improvement practices. Organizations can deliver products that meet or exceed stakeholder expectations, reducing rework.
5. Invest in resource management tools: Utilize project management software to optimize resource allocation and track progress. This will aid leaders in improving efficiency and in meeting project objectives.

By addressing these challenges with targeted strategies, leaders can build project maturity and drive more successful outcomes in 2025. What project challenges did you have in 2024, and what actions will you take to ensure success in 2025?

References

1. https://teamstage.io/project-management-statistics
2. https://www.prosymmetry.com/blog/4-famous-project-management-failures-and-what-to-learn-from-them
3. https://www.tempo.io/blog/failed-projects
4. https://plaky.com/learn/project-management/project-management-statistics
5. https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/failed-projects
6. https://explodingtopics.com/blog/project-management-stats

By Marian Haus, PMP

The discipline of project risk management is all about limiting and hindering the adverse impacts of negative events. The complementary discipline of project opportunity management is all about increasing and enabling the beneficial outcomes of positive events.

In this post I want to look at both practices and treat them as a whole— Risk and Opportunity Management (ROM)—while showing that managing them is nothing more than common sense.

Internal vs. External

The risks and opportunities that are triggered by external project sources are generally out of the control of the project manager’s influence (e.g. organizational changes, political climate changes, strategy changes, technology shifts, etc.). External risks and opportunities are generally difficult to anticipate, avoid or eliminate. The best strategy to approach external factors is to mitigate their impact when they occur.

Most often, however, the source of project risks and opportunities are internal and can generally be controlled by the project manager and the project team (e.g. technical and quality issues, stakeholder requests, scheduling, requirements, budgets, etc.). Internal risks and opportunities are generally easier to anticipate, mitigate, control or exploit, since such events will show up in the day-to-day project work.

Now let’s talk about ROM.

The key of practicing effective ROM is twofold:

1. Awareness: The project team has to be aware that ROM will be conducted regularly, like any other project activity.

2. Active: ROM will have to be conducted actively and not reactively (e.g. when really needed).

Allowing things to happen, letting opportunities slip, or, even worse, being risk averse (i.e. zero tolerance for errors and failure) is not only project management negligence or ignorance. It is yet another project risk (of project-internal nature). Hence, make sure you as a project manager will not fall into this trap and become a risk for your own project!

Capturing ROM

What is the easiest way for your team to be aware and actively conduct ROM? First, put it on the paper—or even better, put it on the board. Allow the project team to write down every risk or opportunity they will encounter during the project course. Next, have the team split the board into four quadrants, based on probability and impact (i.e. low-probability + low-impact, low-probability + high-impact, high-probability + low-impact, high-probability + high-impact).

Then in regular project status meetings validate and agree within the project team on the recorded probabilities and impacts. Certainly there are several more elaborate ways to further qualify and analyze risks and opportunities (e.g. likelihood distributions, decision threes, etc.), but I prefer to keep it simple if possible.

Last but not least, actively capturing and talking about risk or opportunities is not enough. You also have to do something! You need a risk and opportunity response or strategy—whether it’s changing the project plan, getting more resources on board, changing project scope, etc. But that’s a topic for another day.

What do you think? Is ROM nothing more than common sense (at least in its basic form)? What’s your approach to ROM?