Learning from Government Projects

In one of my project management workshops I lead the attendees through several examples of failed projects. The point was to understand a few of the common sources of project failure and to develop risk plans to address these sources. As I prepared the workshop I noticed that almost all of the examples of failed projects were government funded. These failed projects include the Denver International Airport baggage handling system, the FBI Virtual Case File/Sentinal project, and the Sydney Opera House construction.

Due to the public-nature of these projects (versus confidential information on private sector projects) government projects are more accessible and, as a result, are more visible and make headlines when they fail. Unfortunately, the successful government-related projects don't make the headlines. Surely a large percentage of government-funded projects are successfully delivered and many aspects of project management are derived from government-funded projects. So, there must be some positive things we can learn from these government-funded projects and their corresponding practices.

Today I came across a brief but valuable article pointing out some of the excellent project practices we can learn from the government projects. I found the arguments over project requirements processes to be very enlightening. Since the project requirements drive the final deliverables and can determine the success of the project it does pay to improve how we consider and filter these requirements. Tips such as sunset clauses and testable requirements make sense.

While we see spectacular project failures in government projects, we also must realize there are some very good practices embedded in their processes. The project management field has benefited from these practices but we can also learn a lot from their failures too. So let's keep an eye on these government-funded projects, learn from these projects, and improve our own project management practices.