One of the things I’ve done rather too much of is be asked to review failing projects, programmes and build-outs for customers, clients and partners, and come up with solutions and recommendations to help resolve these problems, which is often followed in short order by being asked to help rescue them (often leading to Sun helping them too).

And over the years I’ve built up a fairly large body of case studies and examples, which when I make the material a little more anonymous and write up I will share, but for now I’ve put together a couple of articles that use this experience.

First one to follow this leader is an article on a project review / programme audit framework which is a simple, highly effective and yet generic method for setting out reviews.

Secondly is a piece on why project fail, at least the five macro-level reasons why projects fail, within which I’ve found all programme problems seem to fall. This is of an appropriately high level to be useful to those who review and audit problem implementations and systems, don’t expect to find items such as “it was a triple indirected pointer to a function in C / C++ that ended up at the wrong memory location”.

Anyway really hope you enjoy the articles, because, well frankly, there is a lot of time, effort, experience, and failing projects knowledge boiled down into these.