Five Signs your Project is at Risk

For nearly thirty years, a research company called The Standish Group has been preparing an annual paper called The Chaos Report, which surveys thousands of companies about the success of their software projects. The results of these surveys have been consistent for the past few years. Roughly 40% of projects are deemed successful, roughly 40% are deemed to be challenged in some way, while a full 20% are described as failures. This last figure is that one that should alarm project managers—all other factors being equal, there is a one-in-five chance that our projects will fail outright.

Following are some of the common signs that your project is at risk.

No Executive Sponsorship

Executives control the budget, have the influence to clear organizational blockers, and can facilitate inter-departmental communication. Executive sponsorship is crucial to project success. If there is no executive sponsor assigned to a project, or the assigned executive seems uninterested in the project, then the project is at great risk of failure.

Poor User Involvement

Users must be involved with the project from the earliest possible stage. They are able to give essential “real world” feedback on the work the development team is doing and have the expert knowledge required to resolve critical problems. Poor user involvement is highly correlated with project failure. It is common practice these days to have a dedicated product manager serve as a proxy for the users. This is a good approach, so long as the product manager is a Subject Matter Expert with strong ties to the end-users.

Short-Changing Quality Assurance

It is extremely tempting to “short-change” quality assurance, especially when a project looks like it is going to miss an important milestone. This could involve reducing the number of quality assurance staff assigned to a project or reducing the amount of time they have to test. In environments with highly automated QA, this might involve reducing the amount of automated test coverage or tweaking down the success thresholds. If these things are happening in your project, the risk of failure is increasing.

Poor Staff Focus

Staff need the necessary skills to complete the project but that in itself is not enough. Staff also need to be given the priority and time to focus on the project. All too often, staff are allocated to a project but they have significant “trailing responsibilities” that follow them from prior projects. A staff member allocated full-time to a project may only end up working on it part-time due to these responsibilities. This also commonly happens with maintenance and support duties. Line and operational managers frequently under-estimate the amount of time these duties actually take up, and there is often pressure on them from senior management to do so.

Inadequate Risk Management

There is an increasing recognition in industry about the benefits of project risk management, and this has been supported by a significant amount of academic research. Major project management methodologies (such as PMP and Prince2) include risk management as a core practice, as do common governance standards. Despite this, risk management is either ignored or given lip service only in many organizations. Not surprisingly, inadequate risk management greatly increases your project risk. Conversely, a strong risk management process can help you address all of the items on this list and more.

Risk Register by ProjectBalm is a proven and cost-effective tool to manage your project risks