Project failure isn’t a technical skills problem

I’ve sat in more project post-mortems than I can count, and I can’t remember one where the team lacked the technical skills to deliver. What they lacked, almost every time, was safety in the culture to say so, before it was too late.

The Project Management Institute’s latest Pulse of the Profession research puts a number on what I’ve seen for a while now: 56% of the money spent on projects is at risk because of internal conflicts leading to ineffective communication. Not because the plan was wrong on day one (although I’ve seen that too), but because nobody corrected it once it started drifting. 

Projects rarely fail in a single dramatic moment. They fail gradually, in plain sight, in the accumulation of small, unspoken, ‘this isn’t quite working’ moments that nobody felt able to raise in the team or steering committee meeting.

I once worked with a delivery team that missed a deadline that everyone I interviewed privately knew was unrealistic three months before it arrived. Not one status report said so. The project rating stayed ‘green’ until the week the client found out, because green was the only colour that felt safe to submit.

The uncomfortable part for project sponsors is that the fix isn’t a better tracking tool or a stricter change-control process. It’s asking, at every steering committee meeting, ‘what’s not going well, and who’s worried about something they haven’t said yet?’ – and then genuinely ‘rewarding’ the person who answers honestly.

Skills get projects started, yet it’s team culture that determines whether the truth reaches the person who could still do something about it. Train your project managers in risk registers all you like. Better still teach them how to build a project team where raising a risk doesn’t feel like a risk in itself.

That’s the skill nobody puts in the training budget, yet it’s the one that actually determines whether the project delivers, or not.