I’ve mentioned in recent articles that the many surveys and studies are putting the project failure rate in organizations at anywhere from 51% to 75%. Given this alarmingly, but not surprisingly, high rate of project failure, it seems only fitting that we discuss how to deal with project failure. After all, when a project fails it doesn’t just happen and then you move on to the next project. There’s always an aftermath …. there are always repercussions.
Some of these potential repercussions can include (depending on the size and visibility of the failure and the reasons behind it):
- Reprimanding or termination of the project manager
- Reprimanding or termination of project team members
- Lost future business with the customer
- Bad press for the organization damaging its reputation
- Bad feedback to other current or potential customers
So how do we deal successfully and proactively with project failures? When you’re a project manager, even if you’re an incredibly skilled, successful, and lucky project manager you’re going to experience failure at some point. So we all need to know how best to deal with this impending failure both for our sake and the sake of our team members who we may end up working with again on a future project.
I can’t say I’m always successful at performing these steps and thankfully the failures have been fairly small in very infrequent, but these are the processes that I believe the project manager needs to go through in order to best deal with the project failure in terms of his customer, the project team, and his executive management…
Lessons learned session with the project team
Hold a lessons learned session internally with the project team. Let them all air their issues. Better here than in public or in front of the customer. Many may feel that the failure is the customer’s fault and that can and should be discussed, but aggravations should be aired here, not in front of the project customer or even executive management.
Lessons learned session with the customer
Take what you all discussed internally (tone it down if necessary) and hold a lessons learned session with the customer. No matter how upset you are or the customer may be, this is still a critical meeting to hold and everyone will learn at least something from it.
Debriefing with executive management
Take the outcomes of your lessons learned sessions both internally and with the customer and meet with your executive management staff. By now they have their own view of what happened and how they feel about it and how it may affect your PM role long term, so use this opportunity to get your teams views known to everyone. State your case and how you would now deal differently with the situation. Offer up a proposed different solution should similar issues arise on future projects. Think proactively.
Email press release within the organization