Project Management Research Identifies the Huge Cost of Project Failure

The rate of project failure is still unacceptably high across all industries and as project complexity increases, so too does the percentage of failure, with project blow-outs impacting in a ripple effect across organisations and the wider economy.

Recent international research has found that for highly complex large projects (defined as those with a value of over $1B and funded from both public and private sources) up to a staggering 90% of all such projects fail to deliver against their approved program objectives and time, budget and operational parameters, while 50% of all projects fail to deliver on these criteria.*

These high level research findings** are now being further studied worldwide by The Helmsman Institute to identify and address the critical factors contributing to high project failure rates.

As it proceeds with a three-year, federally-funded research initiative with the University of Technology, Sydney and Australia’s University of Newcastle to create best practice benchmarking tools for project governance, the Institute is seeking wide international participation in this research, to gain further insights into how to make complex projects successful and which organisational governance practices create the highest project performance.

The research study is an opportunity to benchmark an organisation’s project practices and compare levels of performance against other organisations within and across industries.

Participating organisations will receive an overview of the practices that are most relevant to their project types together with an organisation-specific benchmark analysis providing comparative data across dimensions including complexity, performance and governance.

Helmsman Institute Partner, Dr Richard Hodge comments: “There are no easy answers and cracking this troubling issue of project failure rates requires the support of many across the project management professional world. Helmsman believes this research initiative working with private and government organisations is an important step in that direction”.

Dr Hodge said that project failure was symptomatic of a huge gap in knowledge. “The problem has been around for over 50 years. The world has very much built its institutions based on a reductionist approach to analysis and this piecemeal approach remains the dominant mindset. While this approach has its place, Helmsman helps managers think about projects as a whole – taking them as they are and observing how that project operates within a broader operating environment, how it interfaces with its social contexts and manages ambiguities that arise.”

He said the Helmsman Institute is seeking strong international participation from industry professionals in this survey, which can easily be taken online. (http://reports.execution.com.au/governance).

Participants seeking further project management support to address project performance can also access a sophisticated range of online tools created by Helmsman’s Solutions group to help organisations turn project delivery into a powerful transformation capability.

http://reports.execution.com.au/governance

Since 2001 Helmsman has been a trusted adviser to leading private and public sector organisations in industries such as Defence, Infrastructure, Utilities, Transport, ITC and Financial Services.

By combining the client advice and support operations of Helmsman Services with leading edge project research conducted by the Helmsman Institute, we have helped these organisations deliver some of their most complex and challenging projects. Helmsman Solutions group has ‘packaged’ our research findings and years of experience as project managers and strategic consultants into a range of statistical and expert based models, available through online project delivery tools.In addition, industry bodies and consultancy organisations utilise our models to power their own service offerings.

www.Helmsman-Intenational.com