The Reasons For It Project Failure

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

This is a report on the topic 'The reasons for IT project failure are well-known and avoidable'. In this report we will discuss the reasons why IT projects fail how they can be easily avoided. IT projects usually fail for organizational, business or cultural reasons. We will provide a for and against arguement for this topic and we will also include an interview of someone who has been affected by an IT project failure.

The main reasons for IT project failures include; Poor project management, Lack of communication and Poor Planning.

LITERATURE REVIEW

FOR

With so many IT project failures, you would be excused for thinking that the reasons would be hard to explain and difficult to pinpoint, but you would be wrong. The reasons for IT project failures are actually well-known and easily avoidable.

The main reasons include; Poor project management, Lack of communication within the project team, poor planning and Lack of technical knowledge. It was Calleam Consulting (2012) that said that "Given the frequency of occurrence, these mistakes can be considered the "classic mistakes".

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Common Project Management failures include;

Poorly made assumptions

Delays that alter the project schedule and could eventually the ability to make the project deadline

Projects are submitted late

Things need to be reworked

Unauthorized project changes

Cost over-runs

An example of Poor Project Management would be; The Department of Homeland Security, USA, Project Name - Railhead (August 2008). The plan for 'Railhead' was to 'upgrade existing anti-terror tracking systems'. The project actually suffered serious architectural and quality flaws. It was reported that the system could not carry out basic Boolean functions and therefore, concerns about the performance of the project began to surface. Brad Miller, chairman of the subcommittee which was conducting an investigation said "The end result is a ... new system that, if actually deployed, will leave our country more vulnerable than the existing yet flawed system in operation today".

The main reason for this project failing is poor project management because it was a failure by the government to make sure that the key oversight roles were properly staffed and because of this failure, the project had failed to meet the security requirements and suffered quality flaws.

POOR PLANNING

It is common for IT projects to go over their deadline, or to go over budget, or have a miserable team. The biggest IT project mistake is Poor Planning. The results of Poor Planning include:

Lack of business support

Poor estimates

Poor scope control

Many projects that could so easily be successful are in fact deemed to be failures because they overshot their deadlines and budgets. This is often caused by the project manager committing to numbers that are too low, because they have a lack of planning.

An example of Poor planning would be; British Airways (Heathrow Terminal 5) (March 2008). The opening of 'Terminal 5' was called a disaster after 28,000 bags got lost and thousands of flights were cancelled. Problems had continued for over a week and top British Airways Executives were forced to resign because this IT project failure. The CEO of British Airways, Willie Walsh, summed up the events with the phrase "not our finest hour".

The system failed because it could not handle the number of passengers going through it at any given time and forced British Airways to suspend baggage check-in. After opening in March 2008, the 'Terminal 5' was not able to fully operate until April 2008.

POOR COMMUNICATION

Poor Communication is one of the main reasons why IT projects fail, because if there is a lack of communication then any problems and issues that arise during the project are avoided and therefor lead to the IT project failing.

If there is a Lack of Communication in a IT projects then it can lead to such things as; Everybody involved in the project have differing expectations, team members can be surprised, nobody knows what the status of the project is, team members can be told about things at the last minute and team members are unsure as to what is expected of them. These points are based on the points made by 'TenStep, Inc.'.

When it comes to differing expectations, the project manager is usually the one that is responsible because they tend not to keep the key stakeholders of the project, up-to-date when the initial expectations get changed. This could easily be solved if there was better communication.

Team members can be surprised if the deadline is suddenly changed and they are not informed by the project manager until it is the last minute. This can be easily avoided if the project manager raises the potential of missing the deadline as soon as it becomes a risk.

If know body knows what the current status of the project is at all times, then it could lead to decisions being made using poor information. If people are unsure about things, then they have to spend more time trying to find out more information. This can easily be avoided by the Project Manager issuing Status reports every week.

In an IT project, team members can sometimes become unsure as to what is expected of them due to lack of communication with the project manager. Some project managers do a poor job of informing their team members what is expected of them. They can even not be clear on when any assignments within the project are due. This can cause extra work and frustration for the Project Manager and also the team members. This can so easily be avoided if the project manager simply communicates with their team members.

AGAINST

In some cases IT projects can fail due to the Client lacking actual vision for their project, or constantly change their list of demands. This means that the entire project will require review and the timescale will need to be revaluated. If the client lacks vision of what they want then they would be relying on the project manager to provide them with some possible examples or ideas for the client to consider, this again, will cost valuable time. The biggest issue with this is that this can cause unclear objectives for the project staff.

Another reason that the projects can unavoidably fail can be down to unrealistic targets, for instance if the client requests far too much in a short space of time, this will cause the project to fail or at least be incomplete for the deadline. Another reason for this could be that if the project manager expects far too much from their employee’s then it can cause them to burn out or make mistakes that could cost the project greatly.

If during the project the staff or client her personal issues or get ill, this is also unavoidable. Then again, the problem would be on the companies end because they will have to re-task there staff to ‘pick up the slack’ and do the work that was undone. Another issue with the project team is that it’s possible that there could be cultural differences; this could include difficulty in communicating and or understanding goals. Often communication is a unavoidable killer within projects, because some people do not feel sufficiently ‘open’ enough to actually report issues relating to the project or personal issues with their manager or peers. Finally another issue that’s unavoidable within the project team that is often unavoidable is that some members could be inexperienced or do not have a good work ethic relating to the project or work.

The project management can often wrongly target their attention on a part of the project that they thinks need help, but when in reality it doesn’t really. This is often unavoidable because as with all projects, things can be overlooked or missed which further down the line can cost badly. The way to try to avoid these issues is to adopt the top down methodology by breaking all of the problems down into small bits and having a manager assigned and constantly checking it until it is fixed.

Poor demand forecasting is unavoidable because sometimes when the client does there market research, by the time the project is finally completed the product could be out of date. This is far more relevant within the IT industry than anything else because IT is always moving forward and changing. This makes it significantly difficult when doing market research because there is often no trend or foreseeable course for them to see and adapt for. Another issue with poor demand forecasting is that price’s will change for better or worse during the course of the project construction.

Finally one of the most important unavoidable project failures is that if a project isn’t going to work out, the project managers don’t know when to pull the plug on the project. This means more and more money and time will be wasted on nothing, making the failure grow. This failure, while sometimes avoidable, can turn into the biggest IT project failures. To combat this, the company AT&T have project managers who purposefully look at projects and evaluate them, so they can pull the plug as early as possible. This is called Project Evaluation Review Process or (PERP). When PERP evaluates a project, there are only three possible outcomes, The project will ether get a "Go", "On Hold" or "Eliminated". The CIO of the federal government’s general services administration has reviewed over 25 billion dollars’ worth of IT projects and halted 7.3 billion dollars’ worth of projects.

So this shows that failures are often unavoidable but more and more people are being put into a position that they can stop the project before it all comes collapsing in. This form of damage limitation clearly saves billions of dollars.

DIAGRAM

Project Brief Misunderstood

CASE STUDY

The organization I have chosen is British Airways and I will be discussing the technical failure that occurred on March 27th 2008, the opening day of the new Terminal 5 of London’s Heathrow Airport, where an IT failure caused luggage to become congested and resulted in thousands of passengers being either stranded waiting on their luggage when arriving or leaving without it when departing.

The organization was founded on March 31st 1974 and is the largest airline based in the UK.

The service it provides is flight travel to over 160 destinations and has a fleet of more than 250 aircraft. They also provide international cargo services and mail services and "is one of only ten carriers to fly to all six permanently inhabited continents".

Its market range covers support for all passenger types that may wish to use flight to travel, with 3 types of Cabins: Short Haul, Mid Haul and Long Haul for different passenger requirements according to their length of travel via flight.

The initial origin of British Airways came from the combination of several airline companies to provide a better overall airline service to the United Kingdom and was the company that operated the Concorde, the world’s first supersonic passenger service, showing the companies technical achievements and capabilities. It has since 1974 expanded in its destinations available and aircraft technology.

The debate I will be discussing is the IT baggage failure at London Heathrow’s Terminal 5, an instance where on the grand opening of the terminal where the new baggage system malfunctioned and led to thousands of passengers losing their luggage and hundreds of flights being cancelled.

Over 23,000 bags were misplaced and more than 500 flights cancelled.

The main fault was down to poor testing of the system, but poorly trained staff and a lack of communication between British Airways and the airport operator BAA. Software filters that were installed during the testing process were left in place by accident when the systems became operational for the opening day. These filters were used to prevent the specimen messages that were generated during testing and sent to live systems elsewhere in Heathrow and meant that when the main systems went live, Terminal 5 baggage system did not receive the messages about bags transferring from other airlines and all arriving luggage had to be sorted manually.

The lack of thorough testing trials before the terminal opened and the careless clear up of the system after testing caused the system to crash and cause the bags to congest, the situation was "Mayhem" according to a baggage worker who spoke to the BBC.

The MPs said that the trials weren’t extensive enough to prevent this problem. "They failed in the ultimate objective of getting the system to a point where it worked well enough to cope with the opening successfully. The chaotic scenes of late March and early April could, and should have been avoided through better preparation."

Personally, I think that the system could have been better planned and executed to prevent the obvious disaster that would ensue after a system failure with the baggage system. Testing is a vital part of the IT project process and when it comes to large projects a breakdown of the approach to testing should be used to ensure that all areas are fully tested and covered as more serious problems than some lost luggage could occur if a system that operates machinery is involved.

It is understandable though, that the projects construction was over schedule and caused a delay in the testing process because the site was inaccessible whilst construction was still occurring. So to fully blame the testing department would be unfair. Poor project management meant that with the building behind schedule, the much needed testing had a lack of time to check the systems before the opening date. But the pressure of this should not put off a vital full system-check. Precautions should have been put in place to ensure that valid testing was executed throughout the system even in the shortened time-space. More testing staff should have been hired to take care of the workload. On hand staff and technicians on the opening day should have been better trained to cope with a system malfunction failure as well.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report examines the topic 'IT project failures are well-known and avoidable and to research the reasons why they are failing.

The research draws attention to the fact that most IT project failures are caused by Poor Project management, Poor Planning and Lack of Communication and examples of failures caused by these reasons.

The report pays close attention to the 'British Airways Terminal 5' at Heathrow that caused chaos among passengers and staff alike when the system couldn't handle the amount of baggage. British Airways was forced to suspend baggage check-in until the back-log of over 23,000 bags was manually sorted. This project was a failure due to Poor Planning and a Lack of Communication between team members.

It is recommended:

that basic team training is implemented on all future IT projects

OPINIONS

B00187477 - I concur with what is said in the report that the reasons for IT project failures are well-known to everybody and they can easily be avoided if the every member of projects take more care and paid more attention to what was happening. These things would happen if basic team training was implemented. The 'Heathrow Terminal 5' is one of the biggest examples of a project that failed because of Poor Planning and a Lack of Communication and these reasons can easily be avoided.

B00199577 - I agree that IT project failure is well-known and avoidable on the basis that with thorough planning and especially exceptional testing of the project to ensure the end result is fully-functioning and operational to its initially intended extent then failure is avoidable, leaving little room for error and to have the project in capable hands to make sure that if any error does occur that they are fully capable of rectifying such errors. There are more than enough examples of project failures reviewed and published online for companies to weigh in failures with projects similar to their own and to take the required measurements to avoid similar failures within their own project.

B00217515 - My personal opinion is that the project failures will always happen. As much as it can be unavoidable there will always be a failure of varying degree. But there is also much other way you can combat this, by having things like PERP who are able to evaluate when a project needs to be terminated or put on hold, this saves time and money. Good project management also plays an important part in avoiding failure. Communication is also an important key, because if a peer has a problem, they must make it known so the team can adapt. Finally good market research and forecasting is key to making a project work, this can include, suiting the budget to incorporate price changes, making sure the final product will be fit for the purpose, making sure that the final product will work on future systems and technologies. Overall project failures will always happen, and it’s down to the project manager to do damage limitation.