Project Failure Due to Poor Project Management

Project failure due to poor project management

As a technical engineer in a development group, I have seen projects fail because of a lack of dedicated resources and improper budgeting at the planning stage. These issues seem to be driven by an unrealistic commitment to the customer to secure the market.

Background and issue:

Developing a chip or Integrated Circuit (IC) is similar to building a bridge. Just like a bridge, each IC is unique and each revision of the same chip is different. The production cycle could take between six months to few years and could costs millions of dollars. Therefore care must be taken in the planning stage to reduce the revision cycle. Sometimes the marketing/executive team does not consult with all of the stakeholders and will often make idealistic promises to customer. That, in turn, puts pressure on development team to deliver the product within a certain time frame and on budget. Unfortunately, in a competitive market, this situation happens quite often.

In a recent project that I was involved with, there was a lot of pressure from the marketing/executive group to deliver the first revision of an IC to the customer within a short period of time. The project started even though the project manager did not spend enough time on planning. He did not have a solid schedule and buy-in from all of the stakeholders. Some preliminary technology work was done, and a few blocks were developing well. However, it all came to a stop when a key resource, who was the architect of a main block of the chip, was not available as scheduled. The architect was involved in another project that was behind schedule. To make matters worse, there was no budget in the project plan to hire an expert architect or time to train a new candidate.

Outcome:

This particular product (IC) eventually completed