Anatomy of Project Failure

Bram Stoker’s character, Professor Van Helsing in Dracula, said “we learn from failure, not from success!”.

This is a favourite quotation of mine, and with forty years of managing IT projects, I have spent the last ten years studying IT project failure. And I have developed some ‘minority opinions’.

My interest in why projects fail was sparked by a question attributed to the former Chief Information Officer at the Treasury Board of Canada, who raised his hand at a Standish Group presentation in 1995. The question has come to be known as Cobb’s Paradox:

‘We know why projects fail, we know how to prevent their failure – so why do they still fail?’