National College of Business Administration and Economics

Submitted By: Saqib Iqbal

Roll No: 2113201

Program: MBA (Morning)

Submitted To: Prof. Anwar Husnain

 Various studies have revealed that a number of projects either fail or cost/time overrun. Find out major reasons and write a note on it. (Max 2 pages of A/4 size, 12 font size and 1 line spacing. A project is described as a set of activities or tasked to be completed within a given timeframe to produce an expected result. Projects can be tangible i.e. physical structure like dams, roads schools, etc or intangible like changing the attitude of worker in an office or creating public awareness of a disease, etc. It can also be short term like a day or week or long term like years. A project is considered to have failed when or if the goals, objectives or the expected results of the financier/stakeholders are not met or achieved. Anyone funding any project would expect high quality results delivered on time at a reasonable cost hence if quality of work, time frame and cost get out of hand, the project could be considered to have failed. The failure of a project has many dire consequences for all involved especially the financier and the project manager. Although there are many sources of

a projects failure like financiers/stakeholders, project management team, suppliers and even subcontractors, the most common source of the failure is usually the project management style adopted. There are Four Common Reasons Why Projects Fail Lack of Visibility of all Projects Unclear Project Objectives Gaps in Communication No Visibility into Resource Workload

Challenge #1 - Lack of Visibility of all Projects A common reason why projects fail is related to visibility. All three tiers of the project team, executive management, project managers, and team members, need access to the right level of information at the right time.
Executives often complain that they do not have visibility into all current enterprise projects. They often do not have access to the project schedules in real-time. Sometimes project

managers present the plan at the outset of the project, then become gatekeepers of the schedule, claiming to executives that the schedule has not been updated recently and is not ready to be shared. Project managers often put together a schedule and plan at the outset

of a project. The schedule does not always get updated for a variety of reasons. The project managers are so preoccupied with managing issues and re-organizing resources that they do not have time to update the tasks on the schedule and review their impacts. The most frequently heard complaint from team members is that they lack visibility on a day to day basis about the tasks that they are supposed to work on. If they are working on multiple projects at one time, they are often confused about task priority.