Dates: 04 June 2008

CITI presented to the PMI UK Chapter in London on the topic of ‘forensic project management’. If you need to know exactly why projects fail, and what can be done to prevent it happening, then this session was for you.

Why do projects fail? What can be done to prevent it happening? It is no longer enough to consign failures to history, apportion blame wherever it will stick, and move on. This argues a new maturity and awareness that often it is the project environment that plays a key role in project failure.

Forensic project management is the process of revealing the sources of poor project performance. It identifies both the immediate cause as well as the predisposing causes of failure, with a view to eliminating the source. Repetition is the most wasteful and corrosive type of failure.

The forensic approach dissects the project in a manner that analyses the factors that led to morbidity and, where rescue is possible, recommends direct actions to rectify or avoid the problem manifesting itself again.