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Why Best Practices Fail
change in general, or has a personality clash with someone on the implemen-
tation team. In any of these cases, the person must be won over through good
communication (especially if the employee is in a controlling position) or
removed to a position that has no impact on the project. If neither of these
actions is successful, the project will almost certainly fail.
• Lack of control points. One of the best ways to maintain control over any
project is to set up regular review meetings, as well as additional meetings to
review the situation when preset milestone targets are reached. These meetings
are designed to see how a project is progressing, to discuss any problems that
have occurred or are anticipated, and to determine how current or potential
problems can best be avoided. Without the benefit of these regular meetings,
it is much more likely that unexpected problems will arise, or that existing
ones will be exacerbated.
• Lack of funding. A project can be canceled either because it has a significant
cost overrun that exceeds the original funding request or because it was ini-
tiated without any funding request in the first place. Either approach results
in failure. Besides the obvious platitude of ‘‘don’t go over budget,” the best
way to avoid this problem is to build a cushion into the original funding
request that should see the project through, barring any unusually large
extra expenditures.
• Lack of planning. A critical aspect of any project is the planning that goes
into it. If there is no plan, there is no way to determine the cost, number of
employees, or time requirements, nor is there any formal review of the inher-
ent project risks. Without this formal planning process, a project is very
likely to hit a snag or be stopped cold at some point prior to its timely com-
pletion. On the contrary, using proper planning results in a smooth imple-
mentation process that builds a good reputation for the project manager and
thereby leads to more funding for additional projects.
• Lack of post-implementation review. Though it is not a criterion for the suc-
cessful implementation of any single project, a missing post-implementation
review can cause the failure of later projects. For example, if such a review
reveals that a project was completed in spite of the inadequate project plan-
ning skills of a specific manager, it might be best to use a different person in
the future for new projects, thereby increasing his or her chances of success.
• Lack of success in earlier efforts. If a manager builds a reputation for not
successfully completing best practices projects, it becomes increasingly dif-
ficult to complete new ones. The problem is that no one believes that a new
effort will succeed and so there is little commitment to doing it. Also, upper
management is much less willing to allocate funds to a manager who has not
developed a proven track record for successful implementations. The best
way out of this jam is to assign a different manager to an implementation
project, one with a proven track record of success.