Why digitalization projects fail – 1 of 4

Here are 5 reasons why digitalization projects fail:

1. Accepting a forced schedule or mandated completion/ milestone dates without substantial data and analysis.
   1. Programmers, not software engineers, who have not been involved with the project since the beginning – think lifecycle – will assume that all the requirements are known and will therefore commit to an unrealistic schedule.
2. Adding excessive personnel to achieve unrealistic schedule compression.
   1. It takes some time for the people added to a project to become productive. Software projects are complex engineering endeavors, and new workers on the project must first become educated about the work that has preceded them; this education requires diverting resources already working on the project, temporarily diminishing their productivity while the new workers are not yet contributing meaningfully. Each new worker also needs to integrate with a team composed of several engineers who must educate the new worker in their area of expertise in the code base, day by day. In addition to reducing the contribution of experienced workers (because of the need to train), new workers may even make negative contributions, for example, if they introduce bugs that move the project further from completion.

    

   1. Communication overheads increase as the number of people increases. Due to combinatorial explosion, the number of different communication channels increases rapidly with the number of people. Everyone working on the same task needs to keep in sync, so as more people are added they spend more time trying to find out what everyone else is doing.

    

   1. Limited divisibility of tasks, where adding more people just gets in the way of productive people.
3. Failing to account and adjust for changes in requirements and making necessary adjustments to the schedule and budget forecasts.
   1. When you are executing a new digitalization project, you don’t have all the requirements. If you had done it before, it wouldn’t be new!

    

   1. Failing to allow time in the development schedule – think life cycle here – for handling newly found requirements is critical to delivering a project that really does what was advertised. 

    

   1. Not knowing all the requirements going into a project can easily double the project’s budget and schedule.
4. Emotional or “intuition-based” stakeholder negotiation that ignores facts and statistics.
   1. Who are your stakeholders? The Client? A shipyard? Equipment Vendors? Stock holders? First you have to understand all your stakeholders and their motivations.

    

   1. Most stakeholders who can influence your project do not have the technical background or knowledge to direct technical project decisions. 

    

   1. Management must step up and come to the defense of your project when relevant facts and statistics are ignored. 
5. False, but common belief that the proverbial software technology silver bullet alone can solve project throughput or process issues.
   1. There is no “silver bullet”. Various technologies have been touted through the years to save budget, shorten schedules and provide error free code. These are mostly either obsolete or overhyped.

Why do you care?

Here’s an example of what happens when these projects fail, and you learn about the failure in production. A control system failure occurred on a large, off-shore construction vessel. Two control units were restarted twice, unsuccessfully. A blinking red lamp on the PLC indicated that a memory reset was required, even though a memory reset had never been requested by control system diagnostics during equipment operations.  As soon as the hydraulic power packs started, a loud bang was heard. A quadruple joint of pipe dropped approximately one meter to the welding deck below. A second quadruple joint of pipe in the pipe elevator was released (all clamps opened, and the hydraulic safety stop swung away)  and fell the full length of the tower, smashing through a crowded access platform to the deck below.

The result was eight personnel were injured – four fatally. All were located on the access platform and several were thrown overboard by the impact.