How many projects fail and had to be rescued by cleverly engineered ‘garbage excuses’?
In my years as a project manager and an insurance manager, more than 90% of projects fail to be completed as expected especially when considering the originally agreed period and to the specified quality of performance.
Project managers often manage to get away from blame by ‘thick technical report’ which shift any blame to act of god incidence, unpredictable weather condition, bureaucratic approving authorities, unforeseen escalation of prices, unexpected soil condition and whatever else excuses which sound rational to the higher management.
There is no doubt that failure is inherent to a project and failure is the name of the game. However, we have to define what do we mean by failure and to understand failure from other team members involve in the project. What is common is my experience are things which are not given serious attention during the initial project approval process.
