WHY DO PROJECTS FAIL?

A project is described as a set of activities or tasked to be completed within a given time frame to produce an expected result. Projects can be tangible i.e. physical structure or edifice like dams, roads schools, etc or intangible like changing the attitude of worker in an office or creating public awareness of a disease, etc. It can also be short term like a day or week or long term like years. A project is considered to have failed when or if the goals, objectives or the expected results of the financier/stakeholders are not met or achieved. Anyone funding any project would expect high quality results delivered on time at a reasonable cost hence if quality of work, time frame and cost get out of hand, the project could be considered to have failed. The failure of a project has many dire consequences for all involved especially the financier and the project manager. It can frustrate and stress staff giving low job satisfaction to them. The company or consultancy can suffer poor cooperate image and even low market value. The cumulative effect of a single projects failure could collapse a company. In September 2000, the FBI announced the "Trilogy" program, intended to modernize the bureau's outdated Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. The project had three parts: purchasing modern desktop computers for all FBI offices, developing secure highperformance WAN and LAN networks , and modernizing the FBI's suite of investigative software applications. The first two goals of Trilogy were generally successful, despite cost overruns. Replacing the Bureau's Automated Case Support (ACS) software system proved difficult. It had been developed in-house by the bureau and was used to manage all documents relating to cases being investigated by the FBI, enabling agents to search and analyze evidence between different cases. The project was originally scheduled to take three years and cost US$380 million. ACS was considered by 2000 a legacy system, made up of many separate stovepipe applications that were difficult and cumbersome to use. The FBI contracted Science Application International to develop the ACS which was called Virtual Case File Project (VCFP) Although there are many sources of a projects failure like financiers/stakeholders, project management team, suppliers and even subcontractors, the most common source of the failure is usually the project management style adopted. A project may fail because, like Virtual Case File Project, the goals were not clear to the project team. For example the FBI had decided that Science Application International should develop software for its agents to make it EASIER to organize, analyse and share data on terrorism and criminal cases. It was not clear how the software was to make it easier. The definition of easier had been left to the project manager. The financier may lack the experience or expertise to express or describe what they actually require hence the project manager should have spent some more time understanding the request of the financiers. Echoing the requirements to the financiers the way you understood their request and asking for confirmation could have helped clarify the issue of one party misunderstanding the requirement. Another major cause of the failure of the Virtual Case File Project, as with all projects, was the frequent changes in the objectives of the project which was not well managed. The requirements for the software were changed more than once after the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States of America. It was found that the FBI were still defining requirements in 2002 two years after the project had started. Some of the changes were so

drastic like In December 2001; the scope of Virtual Case File software was changed with the goal being complete replacement of all previous applications being used by the FBI against the initial modernization of the FBI's suite of investigative software applications. Virtual Case File Project suffered from what is known as Scope Creep, which is defined as the uncontrolled and unexpected changes in the user/financiers expectations and requirements as a project progresses, and Feature Creep which is the uncontrolled addition of features to a project with the assumption that those changes would not add much to the cost of the project forgetting the that it would impact on the other expectation like the time frame. When faced with such a problem, project managers should re-evaluate the project taking into consideration the changes going to be made. The stakeholders/financiers should be informed of the effect/impact the changes wanted would impact on the project and renegotiate resources and deadline if has to be done. Also the project Scheduling was by desired outcomes, not resource based estimates i.e. just because youre a powerful executive and you want something to be completed faster than 3 years, does not mean that that is possible given the scope of work and resources allocated. However, the scheduling for the Virtual Case File project focused on what was desired, not what was possible. Two quotes from the report illustrate this: The FBI also developed plans to accelerate completion of Trilogy because at the time the projects 3-year modernization timeframe was considered too long. The contractor disagreed with the resulting schedules, because the schedules showed that the full implementation of the project exceeded the proposed completion date of the project. It is easy to see these errors with the benefit of hindsight, but in the pressure of the moment it is all to do easy to massage the timeline to make it look as if you might hit the desired outcome, on paper at least. Lastly, Mr Tellingly, a project manager was appointed only late into the project, the FBI cycled through 5 people in the CIO role in 4 years and accountability appears generally absent due to decision making by committees instead of knowledgeable individuals. In addition to a lack of accountability at the contractor level, there was a need for clearer accountability within the FBI. Lack of clear accountability structures is a clear theme in failed projects

References:http://www.ebscohost.com, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File,
http://strategicppm.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/the-fbis-virtual-case-file-project-and-projectfailure/ KOOMSON EBO 0276291282