Why Project Fail

5 example of the why project fail

1: State of California - California, USA

Project type : Payroll and benefits system

Project name : 21st Century Project (MyCalPAYS) 

Date : Feb 2013  Cost :$254M

Synopsis :

As with many large organizations, the state of California has over the years built up a complex interconnected set of IT systems to support their daily operations. Managing multiple systems can however be costly. There is often duplicated data spread across different databases, complex business processes to help bridge between systems and elevated maintenance and training costs. As has been the trend for the past 15 years, the State of California decided to integrate their systems into a single Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. Merging 13 separate systems into a single system, the 21st Century Project was to improve efficiency and reduce the cost of handling payroll and benefit payments for the state’s 243,000 employees

Contributing factors as reported in the press:

Early reports do not yet indicate the cause of the problems. The project appears to have a meaningful governance structure in place and a supplier with significant prior experience. The fact that the payroll system had so many problems and the fact that such projects do generally have access to prior historical data that can be used to verify test results indicates that quality control / testing issues exist. Additional notes will be added should more information become publicly available.

2: Department of Homeland Security - USA

Project type : Integrated security system

Project name : Project Shield

Date : Jan 2012 Cost :$45M

Synopsis :

A project aimed at providing live camera links from police cars and other fixed locations to a central command location fails to achieve the desired results. Equipment failures, poor planning and poor training mean that as a integrated whole the system was worthless.  Staff are unfamiliar with how to use the system, the data collected...