Why Projects Fail and What You Can Do About It

I recently met with a young start-up company with a terrific idea and as I was listening to their story it reminded me that most companies have failed projects or at least late projects and usually don't know what has happened until it is too late.

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear a company has announced a product release date? How about when one of your competitors releases news that their sales numbers or revenues are off this quarter? If you’ve been around for a while, you might wonder when the real product release date is, and feel pretty confident, maybe even smug, that your own company is on target for its release date(s), sales numbers and revenues.

Or is it? How do you know? While no company gets products to market on time every time and has quarters where sales and revenue don’t meet targets, winning companies track these important project milestones, and continually try to answer the question “why?”:

• Why are we late to market?

• Why are sales not happening?

• Why are revenue projections not being met?

A variety of causes can create these business roadblocks to successful projects. Let’s take a look at some of the issues and questions that, if answered honestly, can help you make your programs be wildly successful.

Getting Products Developed and Launched on Time

Time-to-market is critical for most projects, and rarely will you find a business owner, product manager or product marketing manager that will say otherwise. So why are projects late, and what can you do to help bring them in on time? First, it is important to look at the big picture from an operational perspective.

Program Goals

• Have the goals, there are usually many, of the program been clearly defined and communicated to the team?
  
  
• What are the specific launch objectives? What is the timing?

Processes

• Have you outgrown your product development model?

• How effective are your development processes?

• Who manages your programs – program managers, product managers or engineering? How effective are they?

Once you have program goals and objectives and appropriate processes in place, you have three variables that can be adjusted in product development and launch - time, resources and functionality.

Time Issues

• Is your project scoped and clearly defined based on time to market?

• Can time be added to a program (usually not)?

Resources Issues

• Are appropriate stakeholders participating and adding value to the team?

• Do you have enough development resources?

• What benefit, if any, is gained by adding resources?

• Are marketing resources allocated for a successful product launch?

Functionality

• Are your features and benefits clearly defined?

• Have you prioritized your features by importance?

• Is there too much functionality relative to time and resources?

• If/when you have to cut features, do you know (based on market requirements) which features can go and what must stay?

Achieving Your Sales Numbers

Generally speaking, there is no single reason as to why sales numbers are not achieved. It is usually a combination of sales execution, product and/or company issues and lack of competitive intelligence, assuming that realistic yet aggressive sales numbers have been created based on current market conditions.

Sales execution

• How effective are your direct and indirect sales channels?

• Do you have partners that aren’t contributing?

• Are your direct sales teams focused on the right markets?

• Do you have a sales system that is used by the entire sales team?

• Is there a subsequent sales process that everyone follows?

Product/Company Issues

• Do you have the right product packaging, pricing, and service options available for prospects?

• Have you assessed your product mix and analyzed your product distribution strategy?

• Are the right products and services being sold by the right partners?

• How are your messages resonating?

• How high is the quality of leads generated by your marketing programs? Is your sales collateral useful in the selling process?

• Do you know why you win and lose deals? Do you analyze win/loss factors and evaluate and realign processes and potentially products?

• How are your manufacturing processes working?

Lack of competitive intelligence

• What is your competition saying about you?

• What competitive traps are you setting and what traps are your sales teams walking into?

• Has the competition positioned you as a follower?

Hitting Revenue Targets

Often sales and revenues goals are not achieved due to ineffective attitudes and behaviors exhibited by your sales team.

Outside of your sales team, there are other factors that may result in lost revenues: operational inefficiencies are one of the biggest culprits that can eat into your revenue stream. Review your internal processes – in EVERY organization – and measure your operational effectiveness. Things to look for include

• Quality issues (rework, waste, etc.)

• Inefficient use of resources

• Time – does it take too long to achieve the desired outcome? Why?

• Communications – how effective are your internal and external communications?

We will not go into other revenue impacting items such as travel, expenses, headcount, etc. We leave that for the CFOs.

So why is this really important? Let's face it, times are tough. Successful companies are positioning themselves NOW for the economic recovery. While we aren't expecting a rapid increase anytime soon, the bottom line is that new products and services will help increase your business. New products can get you into new markets or expand existing markets by offering new features and functionality. So take a look at your projects and make sure you set yourself up for success!

We’d love to hear your what you have done in order to make your projects successful. Leave us a comment.