Why Projects Fail

I recently read that Nike CEO Phil Knight and i2Technologies CEO Greg Brady are airing the dirty laundry of Nike's supply-chain-planning-software problems in public. Internet Week recently reported, "Insiders say there's a real possibility that Nike will drop i2 from its supply-chain planning project, which also includes Siebel Systems and SAP. Because i2's slice of the $400million pie is only $40 million, the loss of time would be more significant to Nike than the investment, one insider says. The implementation began in March 1999, and Brady says the software became "stable" last December, after Nike says order-management problems cost it as much as $100 million in lost sales."

Seems like the same old problems, but at a new pace. Although Adaptive Consulting Partners has no involvement in the Nike project, the article made me think about why projects fail and how we at Adaptive Consulting Partners manage to avoid these common pitfalls. In all my years as system integrator on both the buying and selling sides, I have always been amazed at how projects like this can go awry. It is especially amazing that $100 million could be lost insoles and that the loss of time could pose an even greater loss. Unfortunately, it is not unusual, just amazing.

This is tragic, not just because of the magnitude of the loss itself, but because the causes of project failure, especially regarding the implementation of packaged software are readily identifiable, easily avoided, and (here's the crazy part) unchanged in the past 20 years. Most software projects can be considered at least partial failures because few projects meet all their cost, schedule, quality, or requirements objectives. Failures are rarely caused by mysterious causes, but these causes are usually discovered post-mortem, or only after it is too late to change direction.

A few years ago marked the rollout of what could have been called a Titanic of military projects, except the original Titanic was ahead of schedule when it sank. Hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule, the first phase of this huge military system was finally "tossed over the wall" and over the top of a network of separate programs used by thousands of practitioners. Although long hampered by quality problems, big hopes were again riding on the system once it passed acceptance testing.

The intended users refused to use the system. It lacked features they said were essential to their jobs while requiring steps they considered unnecessary or burdensome. The project eventually died a visible, painful death amid litigation and congressional inquiries.

For our purposes, a failure is defined as any software project with severe cost or schedule overruns, quality problems, or that suffers outright cancellation. If there is anything notable about the nature of project failures I have noticed or read about, perhaps it is that many of these problems have been documented for years, but somehow they keep cropping up. Also worth noting is that most failures originate before the first line of code has been written.

Poor User Input

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