What events serve to shatter denial of project failures?
Failures are multi-causal, develop over time, and progressively reveal indicators of breakdown with increasing frequency and urgency. These indicators usually first emerge from inside the project team, the group that is closest to tracking scope, budget, and schedule. The team may attempt to alert management; or, given the pressure to deliver, the team may continue to offer the appearance that everything is still on track. If the team does communicate these early indicators to management, the leaders may respond wisely and prevent project failure; or, out of their own sense of urgency to deliver, they may deny or distort the evidence of failure. As we have seen, statistics show that the path towards failure often pushes past this attempt at correction, and management often tends to ignore or misinterpret early indicators of impending negative outcome. At some point in the life of the project, this denial is shattered by a decisive moment of truth – when the gap between the intended goa
