Why Projects Fail - 12 Mistakes You Absolutely Must Avoid

1. What is a project?
2. 12 Mistakes You Should Definitely Avoid
3. Summary: Why Projects Fail

Project management is often interpreted differently. From the classical IHK project management course with waterfall methods, milestone analyses and a plan from start to finish (often over several months), to the agile project management, which is represented in sprints and digital kanban boards, thinking in days rather than weeks.

Regardless of how you organize your projects, there are mistakes that you should definitely avoid in order for your projects to be successful. In this article, our guest author Bernd Kopin will explain the 12 most important mistakes that lead to the failure of projects and how you can avoid them. Software support from ZEP or awork will help you organize your projects.

What is a project?

In order to be able to explain which mistakes lead to the failure or termination of a project, it is necessary to first understand what a project is. There are different definitions. Simply put, a project is a

"temporary endeavor with a beginning and an end to create a product, a service, or a result".

Important attributes of a project are therefore:

• a time limitation
• the expectation of a clear result
• a high complexity and the needs of good organization

On OMR you will also find a detailed summary on the subject of project management.

Productivity guru David Allen defines a project more technically as something that requires more than three steps to complete. For example, creating a new company website is a classic project. Here, you need significantly more than three steps to achieve the result. For example, there must be:

• A concept created
• Set a goal
• Search for and hire an agency for the design
• Find and hire programmers for the website
• Consider and create the content

You can see already that each task in itself is already very big and can theoretically be further broken down. But how can projects fail and what can you do to prevent a project from being canceled?

12 Mistakes You Should Definitely Avoid

You should definitely avoid the following 12 points when working on projects. These mistakes are classic reasons why projects fail.

1.There are no goals 

A project is successful when the project undertaking is completed and the set goal is achieved. Without defined goals, this can quickly lead to your project failing.

Therefore, it is extremely important to link a project with a goal. This is the first mistake you should avoid: Not setting a goal.

Let's go back to the website project. When do I know if the project was successful? To measure this, exact milestones must have been defined beforehand, i.e. measurable results. For the website these could be:

• Design meets the specifications
• The specified page speed is achieved
• All content is finished and created
• The scheduled date of completion has been reached
• Visitor duration increased by 10% after release

Blockers and counterproductive conversations often arise from incorrect expectations. If all project members know what the goals are and how to get there and measure them, you reduce tensions and conflicts. The best way to create and communicate these goals is through the kick-off meeting.

2. There is no kick-off meeting

Probably the kick-off meeting is the most important step to make a project successful. Points that absolutely must be discussed in a good kick-off meeting:

• Why are you doing this project?
  ⁠-> If all participants understand the meaning and agree that this project is needed, motivation is directly higher.
• What are the goals?
  -> ⁠Make sure that everyone is heading in the same direction
• How do you achieve these goals (concrete tasks)?
  -> ⁠Clarify the expectations of the concrete tasks
• Who takes over which role and has which responsibilities?
  -> ⁠Clarifies responsibilities and thus solves conflicts
• How much time do you have for it?
  -> ⁠Enables team members to schedule their own time
• Who are my contacts for questions?
  -> ⁠Reduces coordination effort
• Where do you document progress?
  -> ⁠Creates clarity about communication

The Kick-Off meeting should be led by a project leader and have enough room for questions. By having an open discussion with the team, points often come up that the project initiators may not have thought of and can now consider in the further planning. The documentation of the project kick-off can look like this and include these elements:

• The project name
• The summary of how you work together
• A status update
• Who has what role
• Who works together

Also documented are: 

• What the key resources (documents, background etc.) are
• Which goals and milestones are associated with the project
• Who has to do what by when

Here we show you, how to host a successful kick-off-meeting.

3. Roles and responsibilities are not properly distributed

One of the biggest mistakes in project management is not clearly defining roles, responsibilities, and authority.

• Who leads the project and makes the final decision?
• Who decides about budgets?
• Who are the experts for certain topics?
• How do I get to these people?

All this must be discussed in the kick-off and then defined. Every project member can always come back to this page and read who is responsible for what.

4. There is no project lead

The central role for a successful project is taken by the project lead. This role should:

• Initiate the project and moderate the kick-off meeting
• Keep an overview
• Request regular status updates
• Be the first point of contact for questions and difficulties

This role should be trained in proper communication. It is important not to neglect the human aspect. To summarize, the following tasks fall under the role of the project lead:

An experienced project lead guides the team through these phases and is always available for questions.

5.There is no plan

Projects often start with good ideas. However, the idea giver is often so convinced of the idea that they start implementing it directly. This is one of the most common mistakes.

It is better to discuss the idea, get feedback and align it with the company's goals. So-called "Idea approval processes" are suitable for this. Here, ideas are checked against certain criteria such as risk, expected return on investment or effort, and only after successful completion of this process they are transformed into a project.

Only then can you decide whether the idea is really meaningful and can be implemented in a project. Then you break the idea down into individual steps, define a goal and the milestones and plan the project (see above). It often feels like taking two steps back and "killing" the idea. In reality, however, it leads to a much higher success rate.

The planning can be implemented very well in a project management tool like the project controlling from ZEP. There, projects can be subdivided into individual tasks and phases, assign responsibilities and assign due dates. So you can clearly see who is responsible for what and when, and how far you have progressed. The advantage of such software is that you can adapt the project to your needs. Classic waterfall projects can thus also be displayed in lists or phases one below the other:

Other projects can be displayed in kanban style (often used for sprints and processes) as needed.

In this article you can learn, how to create a project plan step by step.

6. The team communication is too technical

Projects are implemented by people. People have needs. For our case, the needs for recognition, belongingness are very important. If projects are simply worked off according to scheme F, you risk losing the team on the way. Therefore, a leadership style is recommended that takes into account the following points

• Show respect: ⁠Take the contributions, questions, concerns of the project members seriously and respect different opinions. Only then will you get all members on board.
• Listen first: Even if you have more experience in a field of expertise than other project members: Listening always comes before action. Give your colleagues the opportunity to contribute ideas and/or questions and listen before you act.
• Clarify expectations: Negative feedback or ambiguities often arise from wrong expectations. This is why the kick-off meeting is so important. Here all expectations are clarified and communicated. If questions arise during the course of the project, you can refer to the documentation.
• Demonstrate responsibility: As a project lead, you must demonstrate responsibility. In case of problems and difficulties, you must make an effort to solve them. Rules and expectation behavior that were communicated to the team, you must precede. This is how you build trust in the end.

7. There is no progress control and status updates

One of the most common technical problems in project work is status updates. These are often sent by e-mail. The problem:

• E-mails are often hard to find in an overloaded inbox
• E-mails are not linked to actual work
• E-mails often exclude team members (no CC, BCC)
• E-mails lead to chaos ("who wrote what where when and how?")

That BridgeFlow are not fans of e-mails, we have already described in this article.

Regular status updates linked to your project, referring to individual milestones, goals or tasks, and easy to find are recommended. They also offer the possibility of asynchronous communication where nothing gets lost. This is especially important for remote teams. Here you can see screenshots of a good status update, which is directly linked to the project.

Additionally, there is a traceability of the status updates, which, in contrast to the e-mail, is not interrupted by other messages.

To discuss such status updates well coordinated in check-in meetings, we have created a meeting structure, which we present in this video. 

8. There is no timeline

Where are you? Have you reached your milestones? Are there any overdue tasks? All these are questions that keep coming up in a project team. So that these questions do not have to be discussed every time in a meeting, a project timeline is recommended. This way, you can immediately see if a project is "on-track" or if you have not met a critical deadline.

And the best part: the data is always up to date. No one has to update an Excel spreadsheet or write e-mails, as the individual tasks and due dates are assigned to the respective person in charge and this person keeps the data always up to date.

9. Unsuitable tools are used

Unfortunately, there are still too many project teams that use e-mail for communication, Excel for project work, and Microsoft PowerPoint for updates. These tools are great for their purposes, but catastrophic for your project management. E-mails lead to intransparent communication, where documents, information and updates get lost. Microsoft Excel does not allow real-time collaboration and is too strictly designed for lists. And Microsoft PowerPoint are static information that are stored somewhere in SharePoint or Google Drive and no one looks at them anymore. Not to mention the missing possibility to create, assign and track concrete steps.

This is where a tool like Asana comes into play. Asana allows you to create projects in real time together, assign tasks and check progress. The questions "who does what by when" and "where are we" are answered with a glance at the project. Teams can thus concentrate on the essentials, namely their work, and do not waste time with unnecessary meetings or queries.

The requirements for a project management tool depend entirely on the complexity of your project. If you work in very small teams and with low complexity, tools like Todoist or Microsoft Project are also sufficient. Both are super slim and easy to understand. They are also cheaper than many more comprehensive tools. If you work a lot based on text and need some kind of wiki, Notion is recommended. If you need databases and a lot of structure, a tool like Airtable can help. If you are struggling with the coordination of individual teams, awork can help you Often it is also a combination of several tools. Many teams use Asana, for example, for active work on the project, Airtable to structure the required data (e.g. customer data) and Notion to document processes.
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On OMR Reviews you will find an overview of all project management tools. There, you can decide on the project management software that suits you best based on user reviews and experiences.

10. There is no room for errors 

Frustration in the project team are not only created when the expectations are unclear, but also when the project planning is unrealistic and does not allow for errors. The project leads should anticipate this and include it in the planning. Typical blockers are:

• Dependency on external (e.g. designers, suppliers) who do not deliver in the specified time
• Sickness and absence of project members
• Budget reductions
• Implementation errors (e.g. errors in code; faulty product batches etc.)

Project leaders should make it clear already in the kick-off meeting that errors are expected and the team will work together on solutions. Buffer should be planned in the project for this.

11.The project is not properly finished

The completion of a project is just as important as the kick-off. The team looks back at what they have achieved together in a meeting. This not only strengthens the team feeling and the pride of having achieved something together. It is equally important that the team understands the contribution the project makes to the success of the company. In addition, there are often follow-up tasks that need to be completed after the project is completed (e.g. quality checks or customer surveys), which now need to be distributed.

12.You do not learn from mistakes

At the end of the project, many mistakes will have occurred. Maybe not all goals were achieved, the deadline was not met or other milestones were not met. Errors happen and it would be naive not to plan for them. It is even more naive, however, not to learn from these errors. Therefore, it is central to discuss and document the errors in a closing meeting with the team. This will ensure that similar errors can be avoided in new projects.

Summary: Why Projects Fail

To summarize, project management is not easy and requires a high degree of good communication. If you prepare a project well and plan enough time buffers in addition to the goals, get the team on board and also ensure during the project work that all participants are up-to-date, there is nothing standing in the way of a successful project.