h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The newspapers are full of stories about projects going wrong. Remember the new Wembley stadium? It was delivered many years late and way over budget. Numerous government IT projects have also failed at great expense to the taxpayer.

Yet, is it really all that difficult? All a project manager needs to do is work out all all the tasks involved, find all the resources he needs to do them and then plot them on his trusty Gantt chart, or maybe type them into Microsoft Project, and he's away.

Yet, there is one thing which can always go wrong, no matter how meticulous he is.

What?

[one klaxon available]

power shortage, so he can't type anything?

Oh, he can plan it on his wall chart - he doesn't need a computer.

And even if he did, he could use a UPS power supply with a backup generator.

No, nothing to do with power.

Sudden time flow reversal?

Ah, drat, I was aiming for the quickest klaxon ever...

Of course, he might die before it's completed, or even before thte planning is completed. If his paperboard falls on top of him or something.

While not the answer I was looking for, that's exactly the kind of out-of-the-box thinking we need, TB

*takes superfluous "t" away from previous post.*

Sudden and highly-specific subsidence.

Going bankrupt. Or the company who funded the project going bankrupt.

The project getting shelved due to lack of funds.

Being gazumped.

Getting sacked.

Time constraints.

I'm thinking along the lines of your comparison - The building industry, or is it any 'project manager'?

MMF

Any project, really.

I'm actually looking at the planning stage, here. Of course things can conspire against you during the project, but let's assume our project manager is very diligent and knows how long every task will take and what resources he needs.

What could go wrong with the plan?

No idea why the subject line changed there - it isn't a clue! Just putting it back...

I've been on a couple so - shurrup, Rod.

the weather

the millenium stadium came in on buget

when the contract was negotiated the price was fixed and clauses inserted that the developer would fund any overspend, funnily enough the construction was so tightly controled that it didn't cost any thing more and there was no overspend

Well, it was only 3/4 complete in time for the rugby world cup final, but nobody seemed to mind at the time

A43081986

I spent many wasted years on this very stuff and no large project I was ever involved with ended up anything like what was originally planned. I think it is popularily known as 'project creep' or to project managers as 'bl###y users'.

By the by, it was once brought to my attention that only two 'industries' call their customers 'users'.

I remember watching something on TV several years back that, on reflection, may have been an edition of Radio 4's The News Quiz filmed at the Edinburgh festival. When it came to the teams presenting their clippings at the end, Arthur Smith presented a whole magazine, which, he said, represented a much more relax view to drug addiction north of the border, in that the whole sub-culture had a magazine devoted to it. He then held up a copy of ...


















...




















... Mac User.



Geggs

What could go wrong?

Farmville.

Murphy he say......

'If anything can go wrong, it will do'

and...

'Even if it is guaranteed not to, it will do anyway'

also, 'When things go wrong, they do so in a manner to either cause the most added expenditure, the most embarassment, or a combination of the two'



GT

All good points, but I'm looking for something which can affect your project even before it starts.

If it helps, consider what you do when you plan. You schedule all your tasks so that the project delivers its results as quickly as possible...