Table of Contents

1: CRITERIA FOR SUCCESS AND FAILURE ......................................................................................2

2: MAIN CAUSES OF FAILURE OF LARGE, MULTI DISCIPLINED PROJECTS: .....................................3
3: GUIDELINES .............................................................................................................................4
3.1: TIME .................................................................................................................................4
3.2: COST .................................................................................................................................5
3.3: QUALITY ...........................................................................................................................6
3.4: HEALTH AND SAFETY ........................................................................................................6
4: PROJET CONTROL ....................................................................................................................7
5: EXAMPLES ...............................................................................................................................8
5.1: Wembley stadium............................................................................................................8
5.2: Channel tunnel .................................................................................................................9
References ................................................................................................................................11
1: CRITERIA FOR SUCCESS AND FAILURE

The following are the criteria for success of a project.

 fit for the purpose

 on time
 within budget
 health and safety
 political / social / religious acceptance
 safe in service
 Matching stakeholder requirements
 delivering value for money
 Meeting quality standards
 A sense of success within the project team
 Is reliable and maintainable
 Satisfies the users

CRITERIA FOR FAILURE

“a failure to meet just one of the success criteria”

Most of the large projects fail to meet the success criteria of on time, and then meeting this
criteria usually causes large cost, if time is more critical then we have to compromise for cost
and vice versa.

But there might be different Levels of Failure depending upon the severity of failing to meet
required criteria.

1. Complete Failure
 Cancelled before completion
 Failure after implementation so serious that have to roll-back to previous version or
manual alternative
 Organization is significantly worse off than before, and may be at risk of bankruptcy
2. Serious Failure
 Continues into operation, but does not achieve full benefits
 May be less effective and efficient than existing system
 More costs than benefits and significant loss of brand value
3. Medium Failure
 Some benefits received, but not all
 Many tolerances overrun
 Major fixes required to recover
4. Mild Failure
  Largely meets benefits but some of the tolerances exceeded (time, cost, quality,
benefits, risks, knowledge transfer, …)

2: MAIN CAUSES OF FAILURE OF LARGE, MULTI DISCIPLINED PROJECTS:

The summary of main causes of Large, Multi disciplined projects is given below:

1. Lack of communication between higher level executives and lower level workforces due
to many level of organizational structure
2. Poor WBS( WBS to the utmost level n define time and responsibility for each minute
sub-task) Manageable, Integrate able, Coded, Measurable(to break the project down
for enough will make estimating and accurate tracking very easy)
3. Large projects may involve many people often from different backgrounds and
increasingly with different languages and cultures, so everyone having different
psychics, that might cause hurdles in efficient team performance.
4. Responsibilities of different project managers poorly defined
5. Inventive and complex work involves strong elements of discovery, and requirements
tend to emerge and evolve as the project evolves
6. specification is ill-defined
7. schedule is too optimistic
8. Exaggeration in expectations
9. winner’s curse situation, while bidding
10. Complex and rapidly changing technology may be critical to success.
11. Sometimes fail to provide clear leadership and direction
12. The project team fails to engage effectively with users and other external stakeholders
13. Ambiguity in project schedule usually resulting from subjective estimates that are prone
to human errors or it can be variability arising from unexpected events or risks like
natural disasters or bad weather
14. Large projects have different sub-projects, so also separate project manager for each
project. Mostly the subprojects are critical for the completion of next stage, And if one
of project manager is not a competent, the whole project will fail due to one sub project
15. Different technologies involved so hard to integrate them altogether
16. In large projects usually different governments involved e.g. in Euro tunnel, so there
might be legal, Political and social risks involved
17. Always novelty is involved so more risk and unavailability of previous data, that why
hard to forecast and the success of project management is critically based on accurate
forecasting
18. Poor risk analysis and risk management
19. Lack of safety measures and usually lack of involvement of top management or project
manager itself in safety measures and to act like leading from the front
 20. Lack of engineering resources
21. Most radical will be the technology, greater will be the risk of failure

All of these above mentioned causes can create several risks. Don’t be confused with causes of
project failure and risks. There is a clear difference between both of these. For example, lack of
engineering resources is a cause that can create several risks. It can result in delayed schedules
or rework due to poor quality or incomplete data.

After finding out the risks involved and there causes we can drive out a strategy to control each
of the risks involved.

The risks involved usually are:

Delay (time)

Over Budget (cost)

Quality (fit for the purpose)

Health and safety

3: GUIDELINES

3.1: TIME

The following guidelines are offered to control the time factor and assist in the duration
estimating process and to improve estimating accuracy.

 Whenever possible, make use of in-house experience. Seek out individuals who may
have performed activities in the past.
 Have the people who will be responsible for performing a given task provides duration
estimates. This does not mean talking only to task managers, but also to technicians,
field engineers etc. These individuals have a tremendous amount of knowledge that
should not be overlooked.
 Make all time estimates realistic, without an optimistic or pessimistic view.
 Assume that the work will be performed with a normal level of labour and equipment.
Although completion of tasks can often be accelerated by adding more people and/or
equipment it is best not to assume an exaggerated level of effort. An exception would
be where an analysis of the network indicates that the customer’s required finish date
cannot be met with a normal level of effort.
 Assume a normal workweek and a normal workday.
 Use consistent time units for all activity durations.
  Be willing to break activities into smaller units (work packages) if there seems to be
great difficulty in estimating a particular activity. (If this is done the work breakdown
structure and network diagram will require updating)
 Do not assume that a worker will have eight hours of uninterrupted time to work on a
task e.g. office workers are constantly interrupted by phone calls, other office
personnel, meetings.
 Because reports require revisions, be sure to include editing time (beyond your original
estimate) for making the necessary changes.
 S curve and critical path analysis can be the best technique to monitor the progress on
project

3.2: COST

The following techniques can e used for better estimating the cost. These techniques can be
used separately or a combination of these techniques can be more effective

 Expert Judgment:
o Expert judgment involves consulting with human experts to use their experience
and understanding of a proposed project to provide an estimate for the cost of
the project.
 Analogous Estimates:
o Use the actual cost of a previous similar project as the basis for estimating the
cost of the current project.
 Bottom-up Estimates:
o Involve estimating individual work items or activities and summing them to get a
project total.
 Parametric Modeling:
o Uses project characteristics (parameters) in a mathematical model to estimate
project costs.

Expert judgment technique can be used when no previous data is available and analogous
estimates can be used for those parts of project where past data is available. Then finally apply
bottom-up estimates for the whole project.

While estimating the project’s cost, keep in mind the change in prices of commodities, change
in currency exchange, over head costs, inflation etc.

Resource leveling/smoothing can be helpful in controlling the cost of project.

Resource leveling ensures that resource demand does not exceed resource availability
3.3: QUALITY

Quality is meeting or exceeding the customer’s project needs.”

Project Quality Planning, Neville Turbit

The main principle of project quality management is to ensure the project will meet or exceed
stakeholder’s needs and expectations. One of the causes for poor project evaluations is the
project focuses only in meeting the written requirements for the main outputs and ignores
other stakeholder needs and expectations for the project.

If a project donor is not satisfied with the quality of how the project is delivering the outcomes,
the project team will need to make adjustments to scope, schedule and budget to satisfy the
donor’s needs and expectations. To deliver the project scope on time and on budget is not
enough, to achieve stakeholder satisfaction the project must develop a good working
relationship with all stakeholders and understand their stated or implied needs

Following are the guidelines to achieve good project quality

 Produce Realistic Plans.

 Involve Customers and Clearly Understand Needs.
 Use Repeatable and Repeated Processes.
 Engage Competent Team Members.
 Plan and Staff Appropriate Reviews.
 Assure Proper Testing, Documentation, And Training.

3.4: HEALTH AND SAFETY

Following are the guidelines for achieving success of project regarded to health and safety

 Always use proactive approach

 Project managers should lead from the front in accordance with health and safety
obligations
 Health and safety should be the baseline for all procedures
 Training of employees about health and safety practices
 Communication campaign through whole organization about health and safety
standards
 Involvement and concern of top management
 Rewards and prizes on achieving health and safety standards
4: PROJET CONTROL

Step 1: Observing

 Reports are one way to give many different people a chance to look for potential
problems
 Taking photographs of progress of work can be very effective tool
 Everyone concerned with the project should receive reports containing info. relevant to
issues under their control

Step 2: Analysing

 Involves tracking current figures against baseline (reference data)

 Need to analyse why variation has occurred
 External causes
 Internal causes
 Will this variation happen again?

Step 3: Correcting

 Change link relationship

 Make activities parallel instead of sequential
 Crash the critical path
 Watch out for near critical paths becoming critical
 so keep in mind while crashing activities on critical path that the parallel paths have
enough floats.

One possibility to maximize solution robustness is to include safety in the baseline schedule in
order to absorb the anticipated disruptions. This is called proactive scheduling

A second approach, reactive scheduling, consists of defining a procedure to react to disruptions

that cannot be absorbed by the baseline

Following figure shows the relationship between the activity time and activity cost
5: EXAMPLES
5.1: Wembley stadium

The initial plan for the reconstruction of Wembley was for demolition to begin before Christmas
2000, and for the new stadium to be completed sometime during 2003, but this work was delayed
by a succession of financial and legal difficulties. It was scheduled to open on 13 May 2006,
with the first game being that year's FA Cup Final. However, the new stadium was completed
and handed over to the FA on 9 March 2007, with the total cost of the project (including local
transport infrastructure redevelopment and the cost of financing) estimated to be £1 billion
(roughly US$1.97 billion).

(Wikipedia.org)

The project took 5 years longer than first estimated and costs were more than doubled.

The reasons behind the project failure found out from different sources are summarized as
follow:

The contract was bid out and awarded to one of the lowest cost bids. This creates a winner’s
curse situation,

Information flow around the project was never straightforward. The contractor was conscious of
disclosure to their shareholders and their relationship with the sponsor of the project became so
tense as to ultimately end in legal action. In part, this appears to be related to the fixed price
nature of the contract. This may have lead to two interesting situations, in which it appears more
junior employees were better informed about the project than senior management, senior
management was making statements that the project was on track:

The arch implementation was problematic, ultimately the sub-contractor for the arch was
replaced mid-way through the project, and the delay caused further problems.

when attempting a unique work item, such as a novel load bearing steel arch as fundamental
part of a stadium, it is very hard to estimate cost and duration with precision.

(http://strategicppm.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/project-failure-wembley-stadium/)

The size, value of a project and it’s uniqueness of activities can be a puzzle for the project
manager who is used to planning and co-coordinating common and simple activities (Belassi &
Tukel, 1996, p144).

5.2: Channel tunnel

The Channel Tunnel or Chunnel is a 31 mile tunnel running underneath the English Channel to
carry Eurostar and freight trains between the UK and France. The British Channel Tunnel Group
consisted of two banks and five construction companies, while their French counterparts,
France–Manche, consisted of three banks and five construction companies.

Construction of the tunnel started in 1988; the project took approximately 20% longer than
planned (at 6 years vs. 5 years) and came in 80% over budget (at 4.6 billion pounds vs. 2.6
billion pound forecast). The cost overrun was partly due to enhanced safety, security, and
environmental demands (Flyvbjerg et al. pp. 96–97)

The issues that caused delay resulted from three factors:

Changed specifications for the tunnel, there was need for air conditioning systems to improve
safety that were not part of the initial design.

The communication between the British and French teams who were essentially tunneling from
the two different sides and meeting in the middle could have been improved.

The contract was bid on by competing firms, this framework will necessarily encourage the
‘winner’s curse’ of the successful bidders having the lowest and most optimistic price
estimates.

The financial problems with the Channel Tunnel were caused by overly optimistic revenue
projections, on top of the construction cost overruns.

Interesting aspect of the Channel Tunnel’s forecasts was that a lot of revenue was projected
to come from driving the existing ferry operators out of business. This analysis ignored the
possibility that the ferries would react to the Channel Tunnel with improved pricing and service
and this lead to them retaining market share, in addition the creation of budget airlines
providing cheap air travel between UK and France was not foreseen.

(http://strategicppm.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/project-failure-channel-tunnel/)

Ten workers, eight of them British, were killed during construction between 1987 and 1993,
most in the first few months of boring tunnel.

There have been three fires in the Channel Tunnel that were significant enough to close the
tunnel—all on the heavy goods vehicle (HGV) shuttles

At the time of the decision about building the tunnel, 15.9 million passengers were predicted
for Eurostar trains in the opening year. It was a bit less in the beginning but after 1997 the
numbers of passengers are round about the prediction.
References

Neil wood lecture notes (Camborne school of Mines)

www.wikipedia.org

Prof Dr. Nawar Khan Lecture notes (National university of science and technology, Islamabad,
Pakistan)

(Belassi & Tukel, 1996, p144).

(Flyvbjerg et al. pp. 96–97)

(http://strategicppm.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/project-failure-channel-tunnel/)

(http://strategicppm.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/project-failure-wembley-stadium/)