The post-mortem took ninety minutes and blamed nobody. Scope had “evolved.” The market had “shifted.” Resourcing had been “challenging.” Everyone nodded, someone captured actions, and the same organisation kicked off the same failure six weeks later with a different name on the cover page.
I’ve sat through enough of these to know the pattern. The official reasons projects fail are weather reports. The real reasons are decisions, and decisions have owners.
The report says scope creep. The truth is nobody said no
Scope doesn’t creep. People add it, one reasonable request at a time, and the project accepts it without repricing the deal. The failure isn’t the extra work. It’s that the schedule and budget stayed frozen while the content grew. I wrote about that trade-off in the schedule or the budget. You can protect one. Pretending you can protect both is how post-mortems get written.
The report says poor estimation. The truth is the estimate was a negotiation
Bent Flyvbjerg has spent a career studying megaprojects, and his iron law holds from motorways to software: over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over. His explanation isn’t that planners can’t count. It’s that estimates are produced to win approval. The number that gets funded was never a forecast. It was a bid.
The report says communication breakdown. The truth is the message was unwelcome
Information didn’t fail to flow. It flowed upward, got softer at every level, and arrived as amber. Michael Power called this the audit society, assurance produced for the record rather than the decision. When reporting exists to reassure, the project finds out it’s in trouble at the same time as everyone else.
The report says the team. The truth is the environment
I’ve never met a team that woke up wanting to deliver badly. I’ve met plenty working inside approval chains that took three weeks to answer a two-day question. Delivery capacity is mostly environmental. Fix the conditions and ordinary teams look brilliant. Break them and brilliant teams look ordinary.
Projects fail slowly, in meetings, politely. Then all at once, in public. If you want the honest version before it costs you, ask one question of your current project today: what’s the thing everyone knows and nobody’s written down?
That answer belongs in the report. And whether anything changed for the people you built it for is the only test that counts. I put that argument in what delivered actually means.
Ben Webb is an Australian project leader and speaker, AIPM Project Manager of the Year 2022 and IPMA World Project Manager of the Year nominee. He writes about delivery, leadership and events.
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