If you understand the reasons of failure, you have higher probability of success. First time success is a 'Lucky Phenomenon'. Failures make you stronger and enrich your experience. Let me share some observations and experiences to help my friends managing projects or programs.

1. Confused with Scope

Someone at the top has some vision but what is the scope of my project ? What do I need to deliver ? What I need to work on and who is doing the other dependent piece of it? If you are confused about the scope and have doubts about what is to be delivered, take my word - you are heading to failure.

2. Missing 'Big picture'

Have you experienced this - team members are excellent in their area of expertise, every one knows that their tasks are but the project is still not on track. Having the best technicians, developers, designers, architects is great but do they all know what is the end product and goal? Do they know how the end product will make a difference in the business? Do they know how every brick they are placing or every line of code they are writing or testing will lead to benefiting business?

3. Missing major milestones

Knowing Big picture and goals is the key. Without breaking them into objectives and major milestones you cannot plan and execute. Many Manager start blaming the stakeholder and business that they are not clear of requirements. Often, those who define the goals do not know how to achieve them and what is the route to succeed. Some are hands on and some have business acumen or are thinkers. Not everyone is Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Bill Gates. Going to the drawing board and engaging right team members to break the goal to key objectives and milestones is the key.

4. Delegating and interfering

I have seen different personality of leaders. You need to understand the leaders you are working with. Knowing the personality of the people you work with will actually bring down a lot of your stress level. Once you know the leader then it is about figuring the way to work with her.

Type 1 - There are some who love to delegate and be the boss focusing on relaying message to the leaders. They want to give the best news to the top and will not get into the details. But if they see the news going up is not good they will bug you and start interfering .Without understanding details or knowing the risks, they will make you more anxious and tense.

Type 2 - They will go to every detail and provide their opinion and will rarely listen to you. Sometimes you will feel frustrated that you are not able to do it your way. It is all about how you handle such personalities and give an idea in such a way that they feel it aligns to their thought.

5. Split Communication

Goals, objectives, milestones, highly motivated teams all sounds good and are great recipe for success. However if they do not connect with each other or get 'split communication', you will be struggling to make everyone understand. They all will have great ideas but unless there is a common communication platform and they have opportunity to brainstorm, success will be very far. Communication is the key and here is where the managers need to be on top of it. Communication in isolated groups can only add to confusion.

6. Afraid to saying No to ideas from Seniors

7. Someone wants to delay it !

8. One team and ownership

9. Missing the key constraint

PMI or Prince 2 or Agile and various other methodologies will give you great concepts. What is important for you to understand is the "key constraint" of your project. If it is an idea crafted to improve a process and you are starting from scratch, use the best methodology suitable for it. But if it is has tight time constraints, you need to jump the wall. Lets say due to Covid, you have a project where employees need to work from home within 3 weeks. You cannot start by building everything from scratch with all the processes and procedures in PMP or Prince 2. You need to pick and choose. You have to find the fastest way to deliver to market. You cannot argue on preparing all documents in 3 weeks and then planning, testing and executing. Plan according to the constraints and goals. Keep the success factor of the project in mind. Various standards are "guidelines" to help us to achieve success. You need to be smart to understand and put use them for a successful project delivery.

10. Not using right tools

Note: Please note that these are my own personal views and not necessarily reflect any comment on any of the companies I have worked for. Picture credits to Unsplash

This article is also published in Medium.com

This article is also published in Linledin.com