How to identify a Failing Project ?

Periodically check your project for the following factors, these are the most obvious reasons for failures:

- Lack of user inputs
- Stakeholders conflicts
- Unclear and incomplete requirements & specifications
- No track of changes requests
- Improper cost and schedule estimations
- Technology incompetence
- Lack of skilled resources
- Poor communication
- No timely project reviews

Sucess Criteria deifined in a project shall act as a scale or benchmark. Achievement of this benchmark determines that the project is sucessful as per plan.

Inorder to assess whether project is on track or to forecast whether in future the project could be brought back on track, an effective project performance measurmeent system in line with the success criteria paramaters are to be defined and implemented.

Success Criteria :  Eg. Profit 10%, Milestones achieved within scheduled date etc.

Perfiormance measurement :  Earned Value Method (EVM) !

The perfromance measurement informations and the success criteria forms the backbone any decisions made by the project management team for a healthy project completion.

I feel scheduled task going out of control is a sign that project may fail. As dates and deliverables aren’t aggressively monitored and tracked on a daily basis. Managers are just not interested and leave the issues unsolved for days.

What Mr.Maurya said about task schedule. I too agree with him.

Well another way to spot a failing project is to check out if you and other teams members are doing overtime. If they are doing a lot of overtime, you know where your project is heading.

A project running according to schedule should have little or no overtime.

My experience with number of project says that lack of communication, both formal and informal, is another early warning sign for project failure.If the stakeholders, from team members to users, aren't talking to each other, you've got a problem with the project.

keep contact with external people who will tell what are their views and the actual position of the company in the market.

Not maintaining project documentation is cause for concern and should raise question about the survival of the project.

What I learnt from several failed project is that there was too little documentation to adequately describe the project

Project Scope and Requirements, if not understood, documented and communicated correctly, are the biggest risk factors for a project to derail/ delay or fail entirely. Coupled with this, there are other big issues such as realistic, project scheduling (Not Optimistic or Pessimistic), managing stakeholders requirement volatility, team capabilities, etc...

There's an old saying "If we fail to Plan, We Plan to Fail!" I will modify it slightly... "If we fail to make a Realistic Plan... we face Real Failure"

Once, a project is hopefully on the tracks, it has to be regularly monitored to identify progress. One of the ways can be the "Earned Value". This can be the Budget Cost of Work Achieved, and Actual Cost of Work Achieved. This can be "Cost" both for Cost($) and Cost(Time).

Some of the ways Earned Value can be monitored could be as follows:

1. Project has to be fully understood, defined and scoped.

2. Scope is broken down into manageable major WBS elements.

3. There is an integrated and measurable project baseline at every stage.

4. Only authorised work is performed: - There is no scope creep

5. Earned Value should be measurable in terms of achievement and target goals

6. Deviation from planned values should be highlighted.

7. Based on this, the forecast to completion values to be computed

8. Actual costs to be fully reported.

9. Full disclosure of all results to be donne

10. A Full stake holder decision for the next course of action.

This EVM if conducted properly will give you a clear picture of the total cost to completion(both $ cost and Time cost) and can highlight to Management the same for corrective action.