Project failure can occur for an infinite number of reasons. Sometimes its out of your control. Maybe a blizzard caused your group to miss a series of deadlines or fail to deliver necessary components for your project. Maybe you lost a key member of your project team, or were given unrealistic deadlines. But sometimes it’s in your control. You underestimated the time a project would take. You didn’t take steps to ensure quality. Regardless of the causes, failed projects waste billions of dollars (and hours) each year.
But, what about the period of time just before a project is considered a failure? Projects don’t go from on track to failed overnight. In the meantime, they’re troubled. And the ‘troubled’ period, however distressing, is an opportunity – often the absolute last opportunity – to turn things around and make the project a success. How do we assess a troubled project? When do we put a recovery approach into action? How do we truly rein in a project on the brink of failure?
This article gives a brief introduction to the five steps critical to recovery, highlighting the major activities and actions necessary for turning a failing project into a success.
Figure 1 highlights
these five steps and the deliverables of each.
