Lessons Learned From a Failed Project

 

Most IDs have experienced the frustration of working on a team project that just did not seem to hit the mark. In thinking about those projects what elements caused the failure of the project? Were there any successes in the project? What could be done differently in the future? In this post, I will reflect on a recent failed team project that I contributed to that had the potential to create amazing results but fell flat due generally due to poor planning.

So, what was the amazingly promising project was I working on? The project focused on helping the agency I worked at transition from being a company focused on growing a middle market book of business to one that focused on growing high-net-worth client accounts. The crux of this project was creating a plan for how this could be accomplished and what steps the agency and the personal lines insurance department had to take to ensure they were prepared for this transition and could be successful in with this new focus market.

In setting up the project team, the group consisted of the agency principal (the project sponsor), the personal line’s service team lead, the personal line’s sales manager, a risk advisor (sales associate), and two account managers (customer service). The team was to be led by the personal line’s sales manager (project manager) and was to meet every two weeks to start creating a transition plan for the agency.

Problem #1 – Lack of Vision for the Project

Although the project team knew that they were supposed to help the agency transition to being more focused on high-net-worth clients, none of the team members really understood what these types of clients expected or needed from an agency or its staff. As part of the initial meeting, each member of the team was asked to try and create a list of the five most important things that high-net-worth clients might expect from an agency. Only three of the six participants completed the exercise and were prepared to discuss their ideas. After compiling all of the ideas that were generated nothing was done with this information to develop a vision for the project.

A vision is a foundational element that helps to guide all aspects of the project. It is “a narrative, a story that tells the organization who it is now and who it ideally will be at some time in the future” (Beach, 2005, p. 50). Without this key element being developed for the project, much time during meetings was spent between team members debating with little to no consensus on what was the right way to move forward on the project's key aspects.

Problem #2 – No Plan Was Generated and Proposed to the Project Sponsor

A statement of work provides a high-level overview of how the project will be handled. The key elements of a statement of work include: a review of the need, expected outcomes, proposed approach, and deliverables, timeline, budget, confidentiality statement, copyright, concluding remarks, and established assumptions (Laureate Education, n.d.).

With the project team not taking this vital step in the planning process for the project they ended up with the following issues:

• ·         No clear direction on what the individual team members and stakeholder responsibilities were
• ·         No definitive time frame for when specific aspects of the project were to be completed
• ·         No set of deliverables were to be expected as a result of the project
• ·         No method for holding team members accountable for work that they agreed to do
• ·         No beginning or end for the project being determined (so there would be no way to know when the project has been completed and no way to measure if it had been successful)
• ·         An ill-defined (or non-existent) scope for the project

 Problem #3 – Several Key Stakeholders Were Not Actively Contributing to the Project

After the initial meeting, the project sponsor no longer wanted to be actively involved in the project. He believed that he had put the request out and that whatever needed to be done would be done by the project team and the project manager (the personal lines sales manager). 

After the second meeting of the team, the project manager decided that he no longer wanted to run meetings and would randomly pick team members to conduct meetings notifying them one hour before a meeting that they would be running things. This often led to confusion and a lot of disorganization during meetings with the project manager on numerous occasions “tuning out” during the meetings and staring at his cell phone.

A project manager’s primary responsibilities are with managing people, budgets, time frames, resource allocation, defining and managing activities, and identifying and engaging with stakeholders (Laureate Education, n.d.). Failing to fulfill his duties as a project manager, the personal lines sales manager, left the project team to figure out how to move the project forward on its own.

Several team members also failed to contribute effectively to the project. They would agree to take on tasks to try and move the project forward, only to not complete the tasks months later. When asked where they were at with their work, they would say they either got busy and could not complete the task OR that they forgot that they agreed to do it.

Based on the issues with this project, it is evident that the project team struggled with determining what was required to achieve the larger agency goal of focusing more on attaining and retaining high-net-worth clients. Ultimately the project folded due to time conflicts for many of the group participants and a general apathy towards working on the project. By conducting a post-mortem evaluation, it is easy to define the primary issues that plagued the project and the lessons that could be learned from this scenario.

Resources

Beach, L. R. (2005). In Leadership and the art of change. Sage Publications.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Defining the scope of an ID project [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

 Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Practitioner voices: Overcoming ‘scope creep’ [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Project management concerns: ‘Scope creep’ [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Project management and instructional design [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

 

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Practitioner voices: Barriers to project success [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu