'Why Projects Fail ...'

I have a contract with a US based publisher and have just sent off the finished draft of a book provisionally entitled 'Why projects fail ..'
Due to an absolute word limit of 60,000 words imposed on me I had to chop out all the examples of good and bad practice relating to model engineering (!) which was a shame because it produces some classic breaches in the basic laws of project control, but was considered to be of such a minority interest that it was 'left on the cutting room floor'.
Some of my basic laws such as: 'Sometimes the best solution to a problem is not to have it' and 'Paper is cheaper to change than concrete' or 'Nine women can't produce a baby in one month' can be adapted to our hobby quite easily - If I wasn't so busy with real life I would suggest a couple of magazine articles. meanwhile if any reader is brave enough to describe a model engineering project failure and its root cause I will (while preserving anonymity) develop the raw material for future publication
Tony

Hey, most model engineers don't have failed projects!

They have unfinished projects they've temporarily stopped working on due to interests elsewhere...

If they die before completing them, these projects become legacy projects for others.

I would have thought there are enough examples in the real world of Engineering of project failures that people could relate to much better - Denver Airport baggage system, everything at Berlin Brandenberg Airport, Edinburgh Trams massive time and costs overrun plus numerous Government IT projects.

Even 'successful' projects can waste millions and sometimes billions more than they need to.

Delaying something for a generation or two appears to be a British disease for many infrastructure projects. A million quid a mile for a two lane motorway in the early 1980's has somehow become approaching a hundred million for a three lane motorway in the 2010's. An escalation not even remotely related to inflation. Why build a properly sized and functioning road and junction suitable for 50 years traffic growth when you can stick a roundabout in that clogs every day for two hours in a moring and two hours in an afternoon wasting billions of hours before the job gets done properly a generation later. Three runways needed at Heathrow? Then build it, in 1990, and maybe a fourth at the same time rather than still be arguing about a third one nearly 30 years later. M25? Three lanes? Should have been at least six with multi-lane local only roads between many junctions to keep the motorway flowing.

Edited By Martin 100 on 05/02/2018 16:35:46

Should be a couple or real humdingers coming up soon!

HS2 has already spent £millions on an unnecessary railway without so much as laying a single sleeper and the main contractor (Carillion) has already gone bankrupt. Should all work out really well in about 20 years time.

Then of course there is Hinkley Point. Whilst we probably need the power station, getting it built by a near bankrupt French state owned company (EDF) funded by the Chinese does not bode well for a good outcome. We shall see in about the same 20 year timespan...

John

Tony, a summary with a couple of examples sounds like exactly the sort of article that I would like to read in either of the mags.

HS2 - a vanity project, not needed especially when the money is urgently needed elsewhere on the railways and roads.

Hinkley Point - definitely needed to help keep the lights on, as we have allowed the Greens amongst us to close down the coal fired power stations without adequate replacements to cover our ever growing needs, and we have flogged off our nuclear power station building companies to foreign buyers.

Sad reflection of the UK today when so much essential industries seem to be in foreign ownership - should never have been allowed to happen.

Chris

Luckily the the government are not involved in model engineering projects so the odds of success are improved.

Mike

I can see what Tony is getting at, but I'm with MickB1 on this - I have loads of 'long-term' projects simply awaiting (in most cases) a better idea I don't need them analysing, I just want more time, more ideas and perhaps a bit more money - but it is still only a hobby, and no-one else but me cares about my projects.

There are plenty of projects on the lines of HS2, the UK nuclear failure, etc which could use some close examination. Having been an innocent victim of HM Robbers and Crooks, I would like some of the IT projects undertaken by our 'Government' to be put under a spotlight - as far as I know, no Government IT update or project in recent years has come near success - the NHS also springs to mind.

At the personal and Model Engineering end of things I reckon dear old One Track writing in Motorcycle Sport mumble-mumble years ago had it about right :-

"Do something [to your project] every day."

I inserted the bit in brackets so it made sense as a stand-alone sentence. Original was 3 words and obvious from the context.

Working that way keeps you in the habit of getting on with things and if you are in the habit you can pretty much always find an hour without really noticing. How long does it take to read the paper? Start pushing it back to "I'll work on it Saturday, or Sunday" can soon shift to "-afternoon" then "-evening" or "-every other" maybe "-once a month". Which just doesn't get the hours put in. After all one hour every evening comes out at more or less a days work.

I know exactly whereof I speak having wasted a couple of years not getting on with things, for all the right excuses, when twenty-twenty hindsight says an hour a night would put me three projects to the good. Extra galling when you know there and then that what you are doing is just filling time and of less than no value, productive or otherwise.

Heck there's over half hour gone right here checking the forum and posting.

Clive.

Edited By Clive Foster on 05/02/2018 19:03:57

I read an interesting article in one of the bike mags about the fear of finishing, the gist was that there are so many unfinished project bikes as once you declare a bike finished it will be judged. If you declare it not to be finished then it shuts the critics up. It might be the same with models.

Mike

There's some truth in that, but I think we leave the biggest challenges until last, rather than tackling them first.

Apparently, lots of Cathedrals are unfinished, otherwise a tax had to be paid. Peterborough Cathedral lacks a pinnacle, reportedly for this reason.
Mosques are never perfect, deliberately.

The old, narrow A1, was dualled south of Peterborough, with two lanes each way. When asked why the bridges were for two lanes, rather than three to allow for further expansion, the answer was "That's not in the budget"

Only a few years later it became A1M with three lanes each way, so every bridge had to be demolished and rebuilt.

Carved into the stone lintel above the office block of my former employers (one of the British manufacturers still existing and expanding) is a quotation from the Book of Proverbs, "Where there is no vision, the people perish".

Which sums pretty nicely the forward thinking, or lack of it, that bedevils so many projects.

Howard

Thanks for the comments which all raise a couple of interesting points:
First: I had no problem in finding major and minor engineering and infrastructure projects, modern and ancient, that have failed to either meet specification or were delivered late and/or ran over budget; this was the theme of my book. But having studied and worked in projects for nearly 50 years it occurred to me that domestic or private projects are subject to the same basic laws and can fail for the same underlying causes as major ones so a thirst of my book is that most of us are project managers at some time in our lives and its helpful to understand why they can fail. The classic domestic project I use is the major refurbishment of your kitchen which has all the classic complexities of spacial and temporal planning plus legislation, sub-contracting and cost control.
Secondly: model engineering project fail to meet any sort of reasonable program through procrastination and some of you have recognised this and suggested reasons.
Third: Model engineers (me particularly) sometimes make the classic error of community projects (the village hall etc) who put all the effort into raising the funds and when the project is complete find that maintenance has either been forgotten or doesn't raise any interest - many 'millennium projects' have failed in this way. I built a 3.5" William loco and once it had run under steam it has been covered in dust under a bench - not a lasting project success!

Fourthly: The latest statistics from the USA states that: only 16.2% of industrial IT projects were completed to the customer's satisfaction and on time. Of the remainder 31.1% were cancelled during the course of the project leaving 52.7% that failed to meet the customer's expectations and/or were over-budget and/or late.

Finally my book should be dedicated to the XXXXXX who have taken us into XXXXX with absolutely no agreed idea of what the final deliverable should be which breaches my Law Zero: "No project should be allowed to proceed without clear specification and acceptance criteria, that are understood by all participants"

Tony

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 06/02/2018 19:07:11

Hear, hear.

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 06/02/2018 19:07:26

HS2 will devastate the village I live in, once finished the railway will most likely be OK. The fifteen years of construction misery road works replacing ten year old railway bridges realigning canals etc. And it does not even stop in Staffordshire.

You need to add Law -1: Politicians are exempt from all other laws.

John

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 06/02/2018 19:07:54

Both XXXX and XXXX happened because of crap management and foresight, both are historically classic cases of the law of unintended consequences

The US differences are particularly stark, god only knows what happened under XXXX

Every city voted Democrat and every suburb voted Republican kinda thing, it's a very very divided country

Edited By Ady1 on 06/02/2018 15:26:44

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 06/02/2018 19:08:39

The success rates of IT projects make proper engineering look like a really safe bet!

The bigger the worse of course, with only a really small fraction of big projects being fit for purpose. See (any) Government for example.

I actually try and half plan my hobby projects as if they were real (e..g a bit of planning first). However, most of them are to learn skills not to deliver on time and under budget, so I expect things to wrong in unexpected ways. Extended due to me barely having a clue what I'm doing and an inclination to tackle hard things before i've learned easy things.

Not that this is particularly different to the real world I suppose...

Iain

Please keep away from politics please

More politics will be deleted, not edited!

Whether I agree with you or not!

Neil

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 06/02/2018 19:09:31

Forgive me, but I don't think there is anything political about that statement.

Three factors. The bigger the project the harder it is to manage. Government projects tend to be the biggest of all (but scale applies to the commercial sector too).

(Low) Price tends to be the most compelling factor in government bids. Price and Quality tend to go hand in hand.

Accountability is generally poor. In a commercial organisation, if a major project cocks up, you get fired. In the public sector, they promote you so you can't do any more damage (I'm less sure about that one, to be honest).

Hoping this post will not be dissapeared too soon ...

Iain