Companion to: Ten Project Failure Risks: Using an EVMS to Improve Project Outcomes, by Paul Bolinger
Quick Summary
- Most projects don’t fail from one big event. They fail because a set of common, well-documented risks are left to grow once a project is authorized and underway.
- An EVMS can’t fix these risks by itself, but it surfaces the warning signs early enough for management to act, if the data is read honestly and the relationships between cost, schedule, and risk are examined together.
- Paul Bolinger’s full article walks through all ten, from poor communication and scope creep to inexperienced management, with the EVMS perspective and warning signs for each.
A follow-up to “Why Projects Fail,” which looked at what goes wrong before a project is even authorized, this new EVMS Education Center article from Paul Bolinger picks up where that one left off. It looks at ten risks that show up once a project is defined, funded, and running, and how an EVMS can surface each one before it becomes a major variance.
The article is direct about what an EVMS can and can’t do. It provides the structure to define work, measure accomplishment, and forecast outcomes, and it gives management a disciplined way to see where a project has been and where it’s heading. It cannot correct unstable requirements, weak estimates, or poor decisions on its own. That’s still on management.
The ten risks, from communication breakdowns and scope creep to hidden dependencies and team turnover, rarely occur in isolation. Paul traces how they reinforce each other: poor communication conceals scope growth, scope growth invalidates the cost estimate, weak estimates produce unrealistic schedules, and the conditions accumulate until the project runs out of time, budget, and flexibility to recover. The full article closes with five management questions worth asking on every project, regardless of how the metrics look this month.
Read the full article, including all ten risks and the five management questions, on the EVMS Education Center.