The Department of Defense (DOD) has a record of both successful projects and failed projects. Discuss when a project is, at any organization, considered successful and when it is considered a failure. What are the potential causes of a projects failure? Give real-world business examples for your statements.

In responding to your classmates, explore and discuss similarities in the chosen projects and why that project was a success or failure. Are there any other metrics that might be applicable to your classmates examples?

There are many ways to look at a project to obtain information on whether it was successful or not. Depending on the company the largest one would be coming in over or under budget, for my company this is the largest elephant in the room. The next consideration would be coming in on time for completion, or following the scope plan throughout the completion of the project. Assuring accurate time for cost estimates to be produced and for clear documentation of milestones and deliverables will make things much easier as the project progresses (TechRepublic). Timing and budget could both smaller problems for some companies who have a certain image of what they were wanting, or needing completed. If the project was under budget and on time I believe it would help on attitude, but if the project was nothing like they had planned most companies would be upset. The Project Manager would need to make sure the customer is involved in developing measures for quality, cost, schedule and customer satisfaction (Keys to Project Success). This would ensure that everything was in the order they would be looking for. The most important measurement to weather a project is a success or failure would depend solely on what the customer is looking for and what is most important to them. Each customer will have different tastes as not one of us are alike, this would make communication throughout the total process key to success. The potential causes of a project to be a failure would have to be really high on the upset side, I believe this because I have worked on a few projects when they were over budget and over the time period but the company was still very happy with the outcome. I believe the largest causations of failure would be to not have the proper communication, over budget by more than 10%, along with over the time limit by more than 3 months. I know these limitations are set as standard for finishing the project, but slightly over is about usual for most companies. The last project I was a part of my company was building a new facility, we had proper communication with the contractors and everyone knew their place and what to be doing. In the end we were under budget, over the time spectrum due to weather, and had a few programming issues. Overall my company was very impressed with the new facility and it is making us money still to this day.

Resources: 10 best practices for successful project management - TechRepublic. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-best-practices-for-successful-project-management/Keys to Project Success. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.cambridgeconsult.net/keys.html