Why Projects Fail and What You Can Do About It

January 2005 - BEK Best Practices Newsletter

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear a company has announced a release date? How about when one of your competitors releases news that their sales numbers or revenues are off this quarter? If you’ve been around for a while, you might wonder when the real release date is, and feel pretty confident, maybe even smug, that your own company is on target for its release date(s), sales numbers and revenues.

Or is it? How do you know? While no company gets products to market on time every time and has quarters where sales and revenue don’t meet targets, winning companies track these important project milestones, and continually try to answer the question “why?”:

• Why are we late to market?
• Why are sales not happening?
• Why are revenue projections not being met?

A variety of causes can create these business roadblocks to successful projects. Let’s take a look at some of the issues and questions that, if answered honestly, can help you make your programs be wildly successful.

Getting Products Developed and Launched on Time

Time-to-market is critical for most projects, and rarely will you find an executive, product manager or product marketing manager that will say otherwise. So why are projects late, and what can you do to help bring them in on time? First, it is important to look at the big picture from an operational perspective.

• Program Goals
• Have the goals, there are usually many, of the program been clearly defined and communicated to the team
• What are the specific launch objectives? What is the timing?
• Processes
• Have you outgrown your product development model?
• How effective are your development processes?
• Who manages your programs - program managers, product managers or engineering? How effective are they?

Once you have program goals and objectives and appropriate processes in place, you have three variables that can be adjusted in product development and launch - time, resources and functionality.

• Time Issues
• Is your project scoped and clearly defined based on time to market?
• Can time be added to a program (usually not)?
• Resources Issues
• Are appropriate stakeholders participating and adding value to the team?
• Do you have enough development resources?
• What benefit, if any, is gained by adding resources?
• Are marketing resources allocated for a successful product launch?
• Functionality
• Are your features and benefits clearly defined?
• Have you prioritized your features by importance?
• Is there too much functionality relative to time and resources?
• If/when you have to cut features, do you know (based on market requirements) which features can go and what must stay?

Achieving Your Sales Numbers

Generally speaking, there is no single reason as to why sales numbers are not achieved. It is usually a combination of sales execution, product and/or company issues and lack of competitive intelligence, assuming that realistic yet aggressive sales numbers have been created based on current market conditions.

• Sales execution
• How effective are your direct and indirect sales channels?
• Do you have partners that aren’t contributing?
• Are your direct sales teams focused on the right markets?
• Do you have a sales system that is used by the entire sales team?
• Is there a subsequent sales process that everyone follows?
• Product/company issues
• Do you have the right product packaging, pricing, and service options available for prospects?
• Have you assessed your product mix and analyzed your product distribution strategy?
• Are the right products and services being sold by the right partners?
• How are your messages resonating?
• How high is the quality of leads generated by your marketing programs? Is your sales collateral useful in the selling process?
• Do you know why you win and lose deals? Do you analyze win/loss factors and evaluate and realign processes and potentially products?
• How are your manufacturing processes working?
• Lack of competitive intelligence
• What is your competition saying about you?
• What competitive traps are you setting and what traps are your sales teams walking into?
• Has the competition positioned you as a follower?

Hitting Revenue Targets

Often sales and revenues goals are not achieved due to ineffective attitudes and behaviors exhibited by your sales team. Read Are You Negotiating Away Margins? By Chip Doyle or Price: How Personal Buying Habits Affect the Selling Process by Steve Parry to help guide your sales force in the right direction.

Outside of your sales team, there are other factors that may result in lost revenues: operational inefficiencies are one of the biggest culprits that can eat into your revenue stream. Review your internal processes – in EVERY organization – and measure your operational effectiveness. Things to look for include

• Quality issues (rework, waste, etc.)
• Inefficient use of resources
• Time – does it take too long to achieve the desired outcome? Why?
• Communications – how effective are your internal and external communications?

We will not go into other revenue impacting items such as travel, expenses, headcount, etc. We leave that for the CFOs.

We’d love to hear what you have done in order to make your projects successful. You can email these and other comments to .

Next month's topic: Going International: What You Need to Know

For more information, contact BEK Enterprises at:

Web: www.bekteam.com
E-mail:
Phone: 720-304-3300

Did you enjoy this article? Let us write one for you. Editing services provided by Lorie Loe and Associates. Lorie Loe and Associates specializes in the development and implementation of marketing and communications materials that maximize brand awareness and lead generation.

Copyright | Getting On and Off the List

Unless otherwise attributed, all material is written and edited by Blair Koch, BEK Enterprises.
All rights reserved. 2005

You may reprint material from this newsletter in other electronic or print publications provided the above copyright notice and a link to http://www.bekteam.com is included in the credits. Please send us a copy of the publication.

You can get off this list by replying to this email and putting Unsubscribe in the subject line.

When you forward this material, please send the entire newsletter. Thanks!

Privacy Statement | Contact Info
We never sell, rent, or loan subscriber information to any third party. Period.

Back to Newsletter Archives