Skip to main content

If you build it, they will come...NOT!

The Myth of "If You Build it, They will Come..."

The famous phrase is from the baseball movie "Field of Dreams" starring Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones. The story is about Iowa farmer, Ray, who hears a voice telling him that "if you build it, he will come". He followed the voice and eventually built a baseball field in the middle of his cornfield. The movie ended with a stream of cars heading to his field to enjoy the game.


Over the years, this phrase undergoes a subtle change to say "if you build it, they will come". For some reason, people start using the phrase to say that if we do something, it will succeed, which is a great lie!

All of us want to believe in the happy ending a la Disney movies: if we start a business, we will make lot of money, if we post a video on YouTube or start a blog, it will become viral and we will be rich and famous, if we marry, we will live happily ever after - if we start a project, it will be successful. 

Well, the real truth (and nothing but the truth) is that...

Projects fail, and many fail big time...

  1. Data from McKinsey says 70% of transformation projects fail
  2. 75% of business and IT executives anticipate that their projects will fail
  3. 70% of software project swill be late with 30% significantly late
Even the Bible has a similar story: in the Parable of the Sower as told by Jesus, out of the 4 seeds that were sown, only one (the last one) is successful. Yep, 75% of the seeds failed!

Here are some main reasons for the failure:
  • Weak personal reason
  • Lack of commitment from superiors
  • Inadequate planning
  • Absence of use involvement
  • New and unfamiliar technology 
I suspect that all will find the reasons familiar, because we all have seen in some form or another. In many cases, we did something because it seems like a good idea (at the time). Some also had the idea but we did not take action. Once we start doing the actual work, then we realized we may have bitten more than we can chew and things start to deteriorate and eventually die a uncomfortable death. 

Enough of being grim, how about talking about success instead?

How can the project be successful?

  • Sound processes with adequate training
  • Project tied to business or personal goals
  • Senior management (or parents) commitment 
  • Detailed requirements
  • Realistic schedule with adequate buffer
  • Good stakeholder relationships (to iron out issues)
  • Good change managements
  • Empowered project manager (YOU)
  • Skilled and appropriate team 
  • Availability of funding
Wait a minute...it look like there are more points to succeed that it is to fail. You are correct - success requires a lot more work. But at the end, it will be worth it when we enjoy the fruits. Join me in the journey as we embark to achieve success in our project...any project. 

If you are unable to wait (yes, writing this will take some time, on top of my day-job) and wish to explore quickly to how to do the project, do consider getting my book: Simple Project Management: for Noobs to Pros

Thanks....
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Time Management or is it really Project Management?

We have been told since young by others that in order to do something well, we need to have good time management.  As one who leads projects for a living who knows a thing or two about this, I will say that time management is a fallacy.  Purely speaking, time management  (just like managing people) refers to managing time in which we control time, i.e. we can accelerate it (to make it go faster), slow it down, or to stop time. We can do this with a lot of things but we cannot manage time - it continues to chug along, whether we like it or not. If you were to ask me the time and my answer is, say 9:00am, that time is already gone because it is 9:01am when you continue with what you are doing.  Time is like a freight train or a subway that we can only latch on to and hope we can do things within the allotted time. Ask the student who needs to submit the paper at 11:59pm Sunday night or the employee who need to submit the report Mon morning 9:00am.  In truth, what ...
Read more

The Mental You - Reducing Stress part 2

Just like there are always 2 sides to each story (the good and the bad), we can tackle issues in 2 ways - either head on or perhaps we can do something opposite altogether. The previous post is primarily concerned on how to overcome stress by reducing it. Another way is to focus on something totally unrelated to stress. So, rather than looking at fixing the bad, we focus on the good such that there is little room for the bad.  Let's work on this together... Positive Thinking  What do you see if you turn on the news, or start looking at social media? More often than not, aside from the beautiful people and cute cats, the news is mostly gloom and doom. There are wars and rumors of wars, climate change due to global warming causing floods, and other disasters, earthquakes at various parts of the world. So, it's no uncommon for us to no longer see the world in rose-tinted glasses but glasses with murky lenses. And yet, to reduce stress, this is the one thing we must do - to think ...
Read more

Parenting

How did you do it? This question has been asked by many of my friends and colleagues when they found out about my children. We had initially thought that what we went through is typical. But as we talked to more and more people, it is only then we realized that the journey is not so common after all.  Singapore has been ranked amongst the top countries in the world by PISA, short for the Program for International Student Assessment that is under the OECD umbrella. In some years, it is actually ranked number 1. In other words, to be able to get through the Singapore education system is difficult enough as it is.  The Journey to College  By the grace of God, both my kids did well in the system by being selected into the Gifted Education Program (GEP) - for the top 1% of students - and then getting into Raffles Institution (supposedly the number 1 school in Singapore), and achieving straight As in the Singapore-GCE Cambridge "A" levels, and then receiving offers from a few o...
Read more