Fail-Safe Management

There are five critical rules to keep in mind in development projects, to avoid implementation failure: If you do not know where you are going, ask the right questions; Keep your champions close, but your naysayers closer; Know that informal networks matter; Find and remove bottlenecks; Build the ship as it sails.

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Project failures are not confined to the development world. In 2004 Hartman and Ashrafi found that the project failure rate is above 60 percent for construction, engineering, and other technology projects, despite all the advances in project management theory and practice. This book's interest, however, is in the very large percentage of projects not subject to events beyond the control of project managers. In this regard, attention to the possibility of failure is the best guarantee of success. Understandably, public managers may be uncomfortable with such an inherently negative approach to managing public projects, which are, after all, designed and intended to produce a public good or to solve a public problem. The point is not to be pessimistic but realistic in managing public projects. Anticipating and solving problems can avert compounding those problems and the failures that result. And this book delivered five rule to avoid project failure: i) make it about the how; ii) keep your champions close but your critics closer; iii) informal networks matter-work with them; iv) unclog the pipes; and v) build the ship as it sails.