Why Projects Fail

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Sabrina Williams PM 620 September 13, 2013 Reasons why Projects Fail and How to Prevent Failure There are several critical reasons why projects fail. However; with strong project management skills and the use of common project management techniques these failures can be prevented. According to West (2013) one critical problem is "lack of visibility". This means that the appropriate personnel are not receiving the correct information about the project either via memos regarding project progress or via the availability of the project schedule. West (2013) suggests that the best way that this problem can be resolved is by posting project information at a central location. This solves the problem because all personnel that need to know about the project will be able to access the information. By posting it in a central location this also prevents miscommunication and misunderstanding about the when, where, why, what, and how of the project. A second critical problem is unclear project goals and objectives. Both Mindotools.Com (2013) and West (2013) suggest that this is often the result of mis-management. There are several ways of solving this problem however use the method of prioritizing or ranking project goals in the order of most to least importance and the rewriting the most critical objectives to be clearer to be the most effective method of solving this problem. A third common issue is that management over-estimates the abilities of the team to accomplish set goals and aims. This occurs not only in underestimating the number of hours it takes to complete a project but in terms of the financial and material resources it will take to complete things as well. This is resolved by creating a resource management grid and posting it to the same location as the project schedule. This allows management to more accurately estimate what types of resources and how

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