How To Spot And Rescue A Failing Project

Most often, we all follow the success story/path/strategy of other businesses or individuals. But sometime it may boomerang for new or existing businesses. By the time we realize, the project is already in trouble and started failing.

There are many reasons for project failure. Stakeholders change project objectives, bad planning of resources and priorities, sudden budget or time cut etc. 

It is very hard to spot the early signs of project failure, but here is how you can spot the mistakes relatively easy, if you’re watching and how you’ll rescue or turnaround it in quick time.

It is very hard to spot the early signs of project failure, but here is how you can spot the mistakes relatively easy, if you’re watching and how you’ll rescue or turnaround it in quick time. 

• Stakeholders are not attending project meetings
• Developers are leaving the project
• The financial group is asking just too many questions about daily expenses/resource allocations
• Project Milestones are not completing on time
• Expense is higher than estimated

Once you find out these issues frequently you need to review projects immediately. The review includes budget, expenses, execution plans, resource allocations etc.

As a manager, you need to reassess if you go by the same strategy, plan whether to achieve the project goal on time and budget or you need to stop all project activities for a period in order to re-plan, modify the design, improve the communication strategy after discussing with all stakeholders, and then, finally, realign all the necessary resources. 

Depending upon the unique aspects of a project, there could be multiple reasons for a project going out of control. It may include the following:

Sloppy Requirements Gathering:

With our eagerness to start a project, most of the times we gather incomplete requirements. 

Any incomplete requirements will have both a negative cost and schedule impact on the project, if you are developing a project using a standard waterfall methodology. 

User requirements are still utmost important in iterative development projects which can be negotiated ahead of any development stage.

For projects to succeed, it must start with compact user requirements.

Schedule Slippage:

Many times, project schedules get out of control when dates and deliverables aren’t monitored and tracked on a daily basis. 

Aiming the quick progress of the projects, managers leave behind issues unresolved for days, which indirectly affects schedule managements. I recommend that you should check project schedules daily.

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