Over the years I’ve heard countless stories of project failures.
And I’ve realised that it always comes down to the same key issues.
Recently, a client approached us with an existing custom client management portal that needed a lot of work to get it up to scratch.
Different ideas were being thrown around between stakeholders about what was needed, but nothing had been clearly planned out.
This resulted in a lot of half-baked features creating a very buggy and unintuitive platform.
In the end, it created twice as much work as we had to rebuild it from the ground up based on the most essential features that would provide value to the client.
The biggest reason for project failure usually falls down to poor communication and no clear expectations therefore the scope is not clearly defined.
As well as developers too often biting off more than they can chew.
That is why constant communication is absolutely essential so both parties involved are up to date with the status of the project.
Beyond this, it’s also important to keep it simple to begin.
My suggestion is start with the most important features that will deliver the largest amount of value first (known as an MVP – Minimum Viable Product) and then expand out from there.
Video Transcript:
Hi guys, in today’s video. I just wanna do a quick one to go through the biggest reasons for project failure that we’ve seen over the last few years. So a client came to us about six months ago with a project rescue. So that’s when a dev team’s not really pulling their weight. They’re either behind schedule over budget or not delivering what they promised on. And so there’s a few different patterns we’ve seen over the years and this video’s gonna go into those. So the first reason that we’ve seen projects fail is lack of communication between the client and the developer. So if you’re working with a big team or a small team, regardless of the size, especially if they’re remote, it’s incredibly important to have your dev team in constant communication with yourself or with the client or other stakeholders that are necessary for moving the product forward.
The reason being is that you need to make sure they’re working on the right things and have the right priorities. And by having some level of communication, whether it’s a daily standup, which is what we do, and we understand more about each dev and what they’re actually working on, or whether it’s a biweekly call, then it will just give you a bit more understanding and give the dev team a bit more accountability to make sure they’re staying on track with the expected progress and the expected output. So the second thing as well is the product backlog being too big. And this really comes down to at the very start of your project, if your product backlog, which is just really the feature list that you’re looking to implement, if that backlog is too big, then regardless of whether or not it all gets implemented in a period of time, you may deem the project to be a failure because of the fact that the backlog was too big and therefore all of the things were going to be delivered too late.
So one way around this is really to at the very start of the project, do a product discovery workshop. And this allows you to understand all the features that you want, all the features that are necessary, but focus only on the ones that are gonna drive the most amount of value that you leave and deciding for that to be your initial version and your initial release for the project. Now, once you commit to that, that can be a certain timeframe that you estimate things around, get to market quickly, and then iterate based on the market’s feedback, instead of just trying to chew through a big list of features, cuz you may find actually that those feeds that seem like a great idea on day one aren’t necessarily the direction your product should go in. So the third thing just to wrap things up is really using the right tools. There’s a lot of different tools that are out there, but the key things you need to cover off with different tools to increase your chances of success are having the right project management tool. So we use click up. We’ve also used JIRA in the past communication tools like slack automation tools for automated deployment and also automated testing. So we use selenium for automated frontend testing. So when we’re working on larger apps,
We wanna make sure that features and core functionality are still working when we roll out new changes. So that’s definitely a big one for helping you sleep better at night, making sure that the app’s still working as expected. Anyway, I’ll wrap it up there. Let me know below any sort of tips or tricks that you have. And thank you for watching. I’ll see you on the next one. Cheers.
