Project Disasters

There are two types of disasters I get called to consult on. The first are those mammoth Godzilla software projects that failed, and the second are investments that went sour. When a Godzilla software project is canceled, the organization writes off millions of dollars on its financial statement. In this case, someone is getting fired and the board of directors wants some answers. It wants to understand what went wrong. It is not enough for a project manager to explain the project had scope creep or the project was burdened with excesses process and procedures. Someone high up in the organization wants some answers.

During the late 1990s and into this century, dotcoms were all the rage. Many venture capitalists and other organizations invested large sums of money in dotcoms. I have worked on several assignments where members of board of directors wanted to know where the money went and what happened to the multimillion-dollar investments. Some of the dotcom performances were so bad that I can’t include the performance levels in my data set because it corrupts the data. While some of the dotcom founders, individuals, and managers had great technical skills, they had little business domain knowledge; and many of them had little experience delivering large software projects. It seems that most dotcoms, especially those that failed thumbed their noses at any process or structure. Many of these organizations ended up being train wrecks and squandered their investor’s money.