What are the next steps when your project is failing?

#management

Projects fail for all kinds of reasons. Customers can change their objectives, key team members can leave for other companies, communication is pure, budgets can disappear, materials can be delayed, and priorities can go un-managed.

So what are you supposed to do?

##Step 1## Stop blaming! This is unlikely to be helpful, despite being very tempting. The truth is, project success depends on each and every team member. Every single person’s motivation and proficiency matter. All projects are like a Boat where a leader will show the direction, motivate the team members, and provide them with positive energy from time to time to make sure that all team members remain committed towards a single goal of achieving the project completion milestones.

More you can find here https://jtway.co/who-is-to-blame-when-a-project-fails-595d683da73d

##Step 2## Find out why your project is failing. Communication is key in moving forwards following a project failure as feedback is an important aspect of your review process. Identifying past mistakes is a great way of improving work in the future. The step to recover a failing project is to recognize it is failing. With most projects, there is a time when recovery is possible. There’s no need to panic, but sounding an alarm about a project’s problems is critical.

If you’re still struggling to figure out where the root of your project failure is, consider these seven issues. They tend to be the most common causes of project failure.

  1. Complexity
  2. External
  3. Financial
  4. Operational
  5. Organizational
  6. Schedule
  7. Technology

##Step 3## Retrospectives! You need to assemble a team, seat them all together, and work through a rescue workshop. All key decision-makers must be present. At the end of each sprint, both the product and the process to produce the product are reviewed and corrected if necessary. If an Agile process fails, the process must have broken down somewhere, a more appropriate response would be to figure out what went wrong in the process to prevent it from happening again.

Implementing the process effectively including Sprint Reviews and Sprint Retrospectives with an emphasis on continuously improving both the product as well as the process for producing the product as the project is in progress.

##Step 4## Looking ahead more realistically. Try to find out new ways of rescue: increase the team, budget, time, etc. Confirm the project’s path forward with all who will be involved, in complete detail with precise commitments for each team member. Make sure your communication with the team is clear. Approve that everyone accepts their new responsibilities to the project.

There is of course another option, which is to cancel the project altogether. If the reason for failure is that the project is inherently flawed then there may be little point in continuing to try and deliver it. Ideally, this is nothing more than a last resort and you may have more success in thinking about reducing the scope of the project rather than scrapping it completely.

We all make mistakes and projects rarely run completely smoothly. Instead, identify the mistakes, learn from them, and move on.

Just be honest and open with your team about the progress of the project and the additional resources that may be necessary and accept responsibility for any part that you played in the failure of the project.

Good luck!