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 Soma Bhattacharya

What ways can you inspire a team to stay motivated or perform better to minimize losses? Better focus or more time on details can reduce incoming defects or even breakage.

That’s easier said than done. Getting and keeping the team motivated is no easy feat when the same group has been working together for a while.

So, instead of the regular reports or team meeting agenda, try out different information that might result in the required change. That’s enough to trigger a discussion.

Here’s something to think about in trying to improve team efficiency. We didn’t look at individuals, since we always look at the combined team effort. We looked at the input versus the output differently. The hours worked by the team for a sprint, month or quarter led to the input; and the features or potentially shoppable product led to the output. But we brought in another dimension often forgotten: the impact and usage of what was delivered, the defects that came in, and if any breakages happened. That gave the team something to think about; it just wasn’t the count of user stories or features that went out last quarter, but also how that was used by the clients. What was the adoption rate? How was the flow?

These are just the basics, and I am pretty sure some of you reading this might have tried more inputs, more data points, and have a better understanding of metrics for the team. 

What I found was that by changing up the parameters in what goes into the teams working together, the discussions can always be better. Conduct something like a simple theme-based, goal-based discussion on how to reduce the support tickets by just 1% every month. What would it take?

How you have been able to keep your team motivated?

By Yasmina Khelifi, PMP, PMI-ACP, PMI_PBA

You have probably worked with passionate project leaders who talk enthusiastically, smile or laugh loudly. Maybe their contagious energy inspired you. 

But perhaps, sometimes, it was too much—even counterproductive. 

As a project leader and a passionate person myself, I want to share some thoughts and advice.

Passion can help your team…and exhaust it at the same time.  As a passionate project leader, you remain motivated to find solutions, help people, and share knowledge. Your passion is also communicative and can inspire others and motivate them.

However, passion can become a double-edged sword for you—and your team. I have experienced this issue myself. I was in a hurry to onboard people, giving them loads of details, sending multiple documents, and repeating things by email. For some of the team members, it became stressful because I had forgotten that sometimes, people need space. Some people felt hurt because I insisted too much on helping them.

When I am passionate about a topic, I talk quicker, louder and with more energy. At times, I noticed a few colleagues physically moving back in face-to-face meetings. I wondered why, until I worked with a coach, and she told me: "It's great to have passion and energy, but it can exhaust some of your team members. You need to adapt your energy to the audience." 

It was a wake-up call. I learned to regulate my natural energy and pace of speech. Other project leaders I worked with were so passionate that they could not take a break or disconnect from work, which again was a burden for their teams. 

The worst thing was that they were so passionate that they expected others to be the same and follow their rhythm. “There’s a meeting during a bank holiday? No problem; I’m available.” And if others didn’t do so, they were judged less passionate and less dedicated.

According to research, passion influences your perception of yourself and others. It can make you overconfident in planning, budgeting, or in your own abilities. 

For example, I had to prepare a project presentation. I was very satisfied with it. But when I rehearsed in front of a friend, an expert in presentations, his feedback was different. And fortunately, thanks to his feedback, I improved it significantly. 

Passion can also affect how you perceive others: You may be overconfident in the skills of a colleague because you appreciate them so much.

We need passion in projects, but in a balanced way. Listen to feedback and observe nonverbal cues to adjust your passion for the team. Just because people outwardly express less passion than you doesn't mean they are less dedicated or motivated.

Gather feedback from trusted colleagues or friends regularly so you can maintain an honest view of the projects and abilities of yourself and your team without being blinded by the fire of passion.

What are your experiences with passion—for you and your team?

When forming a new Scrum team, it’s crucial to look beyond the foundational aspects of Scrum and consider the broader ecosystem of practices, mindsets, and collaborative tools that contribute to a team's long-term success. This article focuses on just a few of the many topics that can be crucial for a team's growth and sustainability.

In my experience, teams are often simply taught what Scrum is, but many essential elements are overlooked. This can happen due to the inexperience of the coach or Scrum Master; lack of time to properly prepare; or, unfortunately, a lack of buy-in from managers who push for training to be completed as quickly as possible. 

Addressing these additional areas can make a significant difference in setting up a team for success:

1. Team Culture and Psychological Safety

Creating a positive team culture where members feel safe to express their ideas, take risks, and provide constructive feedback is essential. Psychological safety fosters innovation and allows the team to learn from failures without fear. Establish ground rules for open communication and active listening to build trust from the start.

2. Defining Team Values and Working Agreements

Aligning on shared values helps guide the team’s interactions and decision-making processes. Establishing working agreements ensures everyone is clear on expectations for behavior, availability, and participation. These agreements should be reviewed periodically to adapt to evolving team dynamics.

Examples of working agreements include:

• The preferred days for team members to work on location versus remotely
• The agreed times for key Scrum events like daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives
• How peer reviews of work will be conducted, such as dedicated review sessions or integrating feedback within daily work

These agreements create clarity and foster a shared commitment to team practices.

3. Effective Use of Collaboration Tools

Remote and hybrid teams need strong digital collaboration practices. Introduce collaboration tools to facilitate brainstorming sessions, create visual artifacts, and document shared learnings. Training the team on how to use these tools effectively can greatly enhance communication and efficiency.

4. Backlog Management and Prioritization Techniques

While backlog refinement is a core part of Scrum, diving deeper into prioritization frameworks like MoSCoW, the Kano Model, or Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) can help teams make more strategic decisions. Ensure that product owners are equipped to guide these practices effectively and that the team understands how to contribute.

Additionally, emphasize the importance of properly splitting backlog items vertically so that each item delivers incremental value. This approach ensures that each piece of work completed adds real user or business value. Define a clear definition of “done” to establish a shared understanding of completion criteria and maintain high-quality standards across the team.

The importance of story points should also be highlighted. While story points can aid in planning, their main strength lies in triggering discussions and helping the team share a common understanding of the complexity and scope of backlog items. This practice fosters better alignment and clarity across the team.

5. Agile Mindset Beyond Scrum

While Scrum is a popular framework, embracing the broader agile mindset—focusing on adaptability, continuous learning, and iterative improvement—helps the team apply principles flexibly. Introduce Lean concepts, Kanban practices for visualizing work in progress, and DevOps principles for fostering collaboration between development and operations.

Conclusion

Building a Scrum team involves more than simply implementing the basic rules of the framework. By focusing on these additional areas—team culture, working agreements, collaboration tools, and advanced backlog management—teams can develop a more holistic approach that supports sustainable growth and long-term success. Investing in these practices sets the stage for a resilient, collaborative, and high-performing team.

What other topics are important for you when you train new teams?
 

By Sree Rao, PMP, PgMP, PMI-ACP

“Begin with the end in mind” is one of the recommendations from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Extending that to program management, “Begin with exit criteria” should be one of the habits of an effective program manager.

Exit criteria are the specific conditions that must be met before a program/project can be considered complete. Defining exit criteria is one of the most critical aspects of ensuring a successful product, feature or project launch.

Exit criteria depend on the type of the program. For example, construction projects would have different criteria from software programs. My experience is in software development, and so the examples and insights I share in this post are about software programs.

I will discuss the importance of defining exit criteria and share some tips on how to create effective ones.

Importance of Exit Criteria

Exit criteria are a set of predefined conditions that serve as the benchmark for determining whether a feature is ready to be deployed to meet user needs and quality standards. Exit criteria can be set at various phases of a program, like going from the quality assurance phase to user acceptance testing.

By establishing these criteria early in the development process, teams can ensure that everyone involved in the project shares a common understanding of what leads to a successful outcome. This alignment helps prevent misunderstandings or miscommunications that could lead to program delays.

Clear exit criteria also promote accountability among team members. When each person knows exactly what is expected of them in terms of deliverables and quality standards, they can work more efficiently.

Additionally, having well-defined exit criteria allows teams to track progress more accurately and identify potential issues earlier in the development cycle, making it easier to course correct if necessary.

Creating Effective Exit Criteria

Determining the exit criteria depends on the type of program and the goals of the program. If it is a new feature development, then the exit criteria would be dependent on the success criteria for that feature. If it is a program to reduce bugs across the team, exit criteria would be different.

The best way to come up with exit criteria would be to think about what success would look like for that feature and then create exit criteria accordingly.

Here is how to create effective exit criteria:

• Collaborate with stakeholders: Involve key stakeholders such as product managers, designers, engineers, data scientists and testers when defining exit criteria. This ensures that diverse perspectives are taken into account and that the criteria reflect the needs of all parties involved. Once you set the criteria, ensure you get signoff from all the key stakeholders.
• Focus on user needs: Exit criteria should prioritize user satisfaction and the fulfillment of their requirements. Consider what features and functionality users expect from the product and make sure these are reflected in your exit criteria.
• Set measurable criteria: Define criteria that can be objectively measured and verified. For example, instead of saying "the feature should perform well," specify that "the page should load within three seconds for 95% of the users."
• Balance quality and time constraints: Exit criteria should strike a balance between ensuring high quality and meeting project deadlines. While you can set a criterion that there should be zero open bugs, in reality it might not be possible. Hence, establish criteria that accept a certain level of imperfection while still meeting user needs and business objectives.
• Regularly review and update criteria: As the project progresses, reassess your exit criteria to ensure they remain relevant and achievable. Don’t wait until the end to measure and evaluate.

Best Practices for Setting Exit Criteria

It is crucial that the exit criteria are both realistic and measurable. This means that they should be achievable within the given timeframe and resources, and there should be a straightforward method to measure whether each criterion has been met. Use S.M.A.R.T goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timebound) for exit criteria as well.

• Use prior data and metrics: If you already have prior data, then use that to guide your exit criteria. If you do not have prior data, then look for benchmarks within your industry to figure out what constitutes a good score.
• Prioritize: Prioritize your exit criteria based on their importance and impact on the program's success. Similarly, identify the likelihood of achieving that exit criteria.
• Limit the number of exit criteria: While the number of criteria depends on the complexity of the program, don’t create too many and cause analysis paralysis. It is more important to focus on creating a clear and comprehensive set of criteria that aligns with the program's objectives, rather than trying to hit a specific number.

Here are some sample exit criteria for a software user experience-related program. I intentionally kept it very generic:

Conclusion

Defining exit criteria is an important aspect of managing a successful program launch. I ran some programs without aligning on exit criteria at the beginning of the program and had to scramble toward the end, which caused a lot of stress—and in some cases program delays as well.

By setting clear, measurable and collaborative criteria, you can ensure that your team is aligned and working toward a common goal. Remember that exit criteria should prioritize user needs; balance quality and time constraints; and be regularly reviewed and updated throughout the development process. By following these guidelines, you can significantly increase the likelihood of a smooth and successful program launch.