Managing projects and programs are complex endeavors. The failure rate and scale mentioned in the article is likely to be small. Just think of Obamacare Website when it first went live in October 2013… It failed so spectacularly that all the ineptitude of governance were in public view for a week before someone had the sense to change the home page. But why these projects fail? Is it truly the fault of project managers?
I beg to differ, and this is not to say all project managers, even those who are certified, are without faults. As humans, we are subject to every fallacy and idiosyncrasies bestowed on the rest of the human race. And this is the crux of the problem. Governments and companies all try to do more with less. So going with the lowest cost proposal and cutting corners before even starting the project is a problem. Then there is governance, leadership, scope change and creep, unexpected problems with estimation, and so on. This is what I tell my students: if you want freshly squeezed orange juice, then you need oranges. May you have a method or a better tool that can squeeze 10% more, Unless you are complete incompetent at squeezing oranges, you surely are not going to get 100% more.
This is why project management training, even the training for bootcamps, must be based on real experience. Certifications are only as valuable as the business results that the holder can achieve. Project management is often less about what works in theory and figure out what works in practice.
-Te Wu’s comment on the Mark Sutton article below titled, “Practicing project management “
Mark Sutton for ITP.net writes: Government IT projects count among some of the largest and most complex IT initiatives in the world, so it is a given that successful completion of these projects requires close oversight and application of standards and best practice. Even so, failure rates of large projects remain high. Only one in eight projects are completed successfully on time, within budget and meeting all original specifications, and the larger the project, the bigger the risk.
A 2011 study by Oxford University’s Said Business School and McKinsey & Co, which looked at 1,400 projects with budgets of over $170m, found that one in six large scale IT projects go over-budget by an average of 200%, On average, large IT projects run 45% over budget and 7% over time, while delivering 56% less value than predicted.
Government IT projects seem to be even more prone to failure, with specific factors putting additional pressures and challenges on the public sector. This can lead to some disastrous project failures, such as the failed US Airforce logistics system (ECSS) which was scrapped in 2012 at a cost of $1bn, or the UK National Health Service patient record scheme which was cancelled with an ongoing cost of well over $10bn. While no such high-level failures have been disclosed in the GCC, with increasing digitisation of government, comes a growing need for good project management practices and procedures to steer projects to successful completion. SNIP, the article continues @ ITP.net, click here to continue reading….