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How to Identify the Projects That Are Most Likely to Fail

By: Rune Aresvik

If you are in the same situation as many of our readers you are responsible for a portfolio of projects, and are having to spend too much time checking on how these projects are performing. In fact, there is an easier way to do this by focusing your attention on the projects that are most likely to fail, and spending less time on the projects that are likely to go well.

How do you know which projects are most likely to get into trouble? Easy; project failure is mainly driven by project-complexity. In other words, if you can objectively measure the complexity of your projects you can rank your projects on the likelihood of each project getting into problems, and can prioritize your time accordingly. How do you know which projects are the most complex? Again, this can be done fairly easily by understanding the complexity drivers for projects, and scoring each project on these dimensions.

Project complexity can be measured on two main dimensions. These are a) internal complexity, and b) external complexity. Internal complexity is based on issues related to the way that the team members need to interact, and the type of work that they need to do. External complexity, on the other hand, is driven by the overall environment in which the project needs to work. For each of these two dimensions, it is possible to define four key complexity-drivers, and the higher the score on each driver (using a scale from 1-5) the more complex the project is. The internal complexity of a project is driven by:
1) The distance of the work to be carried out by the project to the day-to-day activities of its members
2) The organizational distance between the units where the project participants come from
3) The level of sophistication required in the data collection and analysis to be carried out by the team
4) The level of the "out of the box" thinking required for developing optimal conclusions

External complexity is driven by:
1) The level of pressure from management for achieving concrete and challenging results
2) Openness of project goals to interpretation and level of political elements in goal definition
3) Level of expected uncomfortableness to project participants resulting from project results
4) Required level of communication to various stakeholders for getting the necessary buy-in for results

The scores on each of these dimensions determine the overall complexity of the project. A project that scores higher than fourteen on each dimension is a complex political project, and should be followed up very closely. If you focus your attention on the complex political projects in your portfolio, you are sure to increase the overall success rate of your projects, as the other, less complex projects are much less likely to experience problems. Carrying out this prioritization process has helped many project managers prioritize their overall work, and has also helped make individual projects more successful by focusing project activities on crucial issues.

Article Source: http://www.bluearticles.com


Rune Aresvik is the founder of Team Based Consulting. Go to Team Based Consulting and download article highlighting how to make complex projects successful, and to find out how Rune can help you with project management training and project management consulting.

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