Why projects (still) fail, and what you can do about it

Wednesday 5th December 2012, 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Dr. Graham Oakes, FBCS.

Venue: Room 4.31, University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB.

Refreshments and networking from 6:00 pm.

This event is free of charge and open to all. No registration required - just turn up.

Synopsis

Organisations see their projects fail for a host of reasons: delayed launch dates, budget overruns, user resistance to new systems and processes, etc. These are only the surface symptoms of failure — the real reasons lie deeper. The project management literature identifies a half dozen or so deeper causes that underlie most project failures. But the project managers have been highlighting these causes for decades, yet projects continue to fail. What’s going wrong? This talk will dig even deeper into the causes of project failure, and look at what we can do to prevent them, or at least catch them before they blow up into major disasters.

About the speaker

Graham Oakes helps people untangle complex technology, relationships, processes and governance. As an independent consultant, he helps organisations such as the Open University, Oxfam, Skype, Sony and Vodafone to define strategy, initiate projects and hence run those projects effectively. Dr Oakes has held positions including Director of Technology at Sapient Ltd and Head of Project Management for Psygnosis Ltd. His book Project Reviews, Assurance and Governance is published by Gower.