And the project management best practices that might have prevented them
Complex projects are difficult to pull off. That’s why the story of humanity is full of tales of construction efforts that went over budget, product launches that missed delivery deadlines by shocking amounts, and megaprojects that ruined lives and disappointed everyone who voted for the endeavor.
Any time you attempt to build something – whether it is a software product, a network installation, or construction project – that requires many people to work together and involves a large number of steps, decisions, and tasks – you run the risk of hitting chaos. The more complex the project, the more likely the chaos. Less than half of big projects are delivered on budget and only 8.5% of them are delivered on time and on budget.
A better project plan can help.
Bent Flyvbjerg, an Oxford economist who studied the outcomes of thousands of large projects said, “Think slow, act fast. The irony of megaprojects is that many are late because not enough time is spent planning, which is the most efficient way to minimize uncertainty and shrink risk. You don’t want to start digging before you know exactly what you’re doing.”
Here are five project management disasters and the project management mistakes they made.
1) The Affordable Care Act Website
The Affordable Care Act became law on March 23, 2010. But its website launch – the only way people could sign up for coverage – has become a famous project management disaster.
The team had a firm launch deadline of October 1, 2013, which gave it three years to build a website that healthcare seekers could use to sign up for coverage. It was not ready on the day it launched. Only six of the 250,000 people who attempted to sign up managed it before the site went down completely. The budget overages were shocking, too. The initial $93.7 million budget swelled to $1.7 billion.
Many of the problems that plagued the project could have been avoided if the team had built a better plan.
No single source of truth
Not only did this project not use a tool that every team member could turn to for work assignments, status updates, and changes but no one was in charge of the project. No project leader had the authority to look at the big picture and make decisions. It was a big team, spread across many divisions of government, but it lacked a formal division of labor and work happened in silos, which caused decision-making and communication delays.
A broken project plan
The project required a combination of technology and insurance industry experts. But many key technical positions were never filled. Without technical expertise, project managers couldn’t estimate durations for the work to come up with a clear timeline. The launch date was mandated but key data for planning backward from that date was missing.
2) Boston Big Dig
Boston’s Big Dig was an ambitious project. And it encountered problems that were difficult to predict, even with the many feasibility studies, risk assessments, and other studies that were done in advance. Even though Boston brought in an expert team to build it, the project exceeded its completion estimate by years and its final budget was five times the original estimate of $2.56 billion.
Inaccurate scope
One reason the project went so far over budget was likely that the initial project scope failed to take many factors into account. The costs were wildly underestimated, possibly for political reasons. But the scope of the construction undertaking – and the complications of doing the work in the oldest part of a heavily populated city – were also underestimated.
Scope creep
The big dig was plagued by design changes – each one causing scope creep. Many of these were the result of discovering what was under the site. Construction was done in an historic area with underground utilities that were, in some cases, hundreds of years old. Some of the changes brought in more stakeholders, which led to more delays. The discovery, for example, of a revolutionary-era sites and Native American artifacts brought historical preservation and Native American groups into the project.
Poor communication
The project was mired in complex communication problems. It relied on a project management team that involved all participants in decision making but the team was not fully integrated – it had no single source of truth – until late in the project.
3) The California High Speed Railway
The California high-speed rail train promises to connect the San Francisco Bay Area with Los Angeles, transforming the vast area in between those two urban centers by making it accessible. The project was approved in 2008 with a promised completion date of 2020. To date, very little progress has been made. New completion estimates, for a small piece of railway, have stretched to 2033. The budget estimates have exploded to $100 billion more than was originally proposed.
No project plan
Experts say that the project launched without a real plan. The rail authority had never built a high-speed rail system and planned to learn how in real time. There was no clear plan for acquiring the land or even for which land to acquire. And environmental reviews, lawsuits, and political interference have caused what little plan there was to change constantly. Some construction has happened in the central valley but, with no real plan, there is no way to get clarity on the timeline, resources, or budgets, which makes it difficult to move the project forward. It seems likely that the project will fail, and the railway will never get built.
4) Denver International Airport
The Denver International Airport is the second largest airport on Earth and a major airline hub in the United Stated. It was supposed to have a state-of-the-art baggage handling system that would revolutionize the airport industry. But, because of a failed project, baggage is still handled manually.
Scope Creep
Initial plans for the baggage system were less ambitious: United wouldn’t move to the airport without an automated baggage handling system, so the initial plan was to build one only for that airline. But mid-way through construction, the plan expanded to include all airlines, vastly increasing the complexity of the plan.
Poor risk management
A project plan that demanded a risk assessment for substantial changes would have seen the problems that came next before they happened. But no real risk assessment was done here and the project continued. After many delays and huge cost overruns that delayed the opening of the airport by 16 months, the press was invited to witness the new baggage handling marvel. It failed, throwing luggage, clothing, and belongings all over the tarmac and under the rails. The project was scrapped.
5) Target Canada
Target’s entry into the Canadian market is an oft-told project management warning. What might have been a thriving industry, a major employer, and a step toward becoming an international brand, ended when Target Canada filed for creditor protection, putting 17,600 people out of work and costing the company billions.
An unrealistic timeline
A clear, realistic timeline – and leaders who understood it – would have prevented so much anguish here. Everyone knew the plan was ambitious: Remodel, stock, staff, and open 124 Target locations in Canada in two years.
Driven by a hefty Real Estate purchase, the company went into the plan in a hurry. That mood affected every decision, including the one to implement technologies that were untested and new to the company – and that ultimately broke its supply chain.
Even when leaders were shown, a month before the first stores were to open, that the timeline was unrealistic and the stores weren’t ready, the company’s leadership was too deep into its momentum to slow down. It opened the stores according to schedule.
The store shelves were empty. The supply chain was broken. The staff were untrained. No one knew how to use the new software. It was a disaster.
The company never recovered from this unrealistic timeline and the poor decisions it caused. It closed all stores two years after opening.
Is your team trying to avoid potential nightmare project management failures in the future? Book a demo to see how Moovila Perfect Project’s 24/7 project monitoring remediates risks before they occur.
