Agile Project Management Company, Zen Ex Machina, Explains the Top Reasons Why Business Projects Fail

BRISBANE, Australia, Aug. 28, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- There are many reasons why projects and product development effort fail. Whether it be micromanagement or lack of communication, these failures are easy to avoid with an agile mindset and a properly educated team. It is important to arm your team with knowledge and skills to complete their projects, but it is also important to inform them of what to avoid and how to pivot when necessary. Here, agile project management company, Zen Ex Machina, explains some of the top reasons that business projects fail.

Poor communication. The key to success in any project, no matter what the task, is communication among your teams. If your teams don't communicate, there is no way for them to share their knowledge and experiences, including obstacles they are encountering and successes they are experiencing. Tactics from agile frameworks – like Scrum's Retrospectives, Scrum of Scrums – allows for teams to collaboratively adapt to challenges in the whole system of work.

Lack of team planning. Like communication, planning is crucial to ensure your teams understanding of strategic goals so they can align their objectives. A good way to do this is to start every day with a team planning session where the immediate goals are considered in light of the last 24 hours of work and work for the next 24 hours assessed and adjusted. This enables everybody to not only make work transparent but also adapt to emerging changes so that the team's goals are always met.

Irresponsible use of resources. Many projects fail due to poor use of time and resources. It should be clear across all teams who is working on what, and when. Otherwise, teams become disorganised and the resources put into it go to waste. During any planning event – Daily Scrum and Sprint Planning – ensure expectations are set regarding resource constraints, capacity, and work load so that the system of work is never overloaded or strained.

Unreliable estimates. Accurate estimates are vital to setting expectations to clients and stakeholders about important milestones, benefits and outcomes. Traditional planning activities, however, rely on estimates at the start of product development initiatives when the least is known about the final outcome. Leveraging smarter estimation techniques, such as wideband delphi, understanding the necessary trade-offs of precision in longer term goals as the cone of uncertainty widens, and re-planning and estimating the future rigorously on a cadence is key to success.

About Zen Ex Machina:

Zen Ex Machina UX Consulting Services Company's mission is to improve the quality of people's working lives – from executives and their managers through to teams – through contemporary ways of working. Our entire purpose is to help executives transform the way their entire organisation operates, so they become more productive, and more responsive to changing market, customer and stakeholder needs through smarter ways of working. Combining unmatched practical agile experience that spans almost two decades, Zen Ex Machina's consultants work as catalysts to the cultural change that agile demands, combining executive mentoring, change leadership, and agile coaching and training, to embed helps teams, complex programs, and whole organisations, to nimbly adjust to and take advantage of emerging opportunities.

SOURCE Zen Ex Machina