Understanding project risk: Lessons from past failures

One underexplored method of project risk assessment lies in the use of past project failures as a method for suggesting likely forms of future risk and reasonable approaches for mitigating these concerns. The study of famous project failures holds a number of important lessons for project managers. The obvious difficulty in looking at disaster lies in our willingness to objectively mine these failures for their relevant lessons. This paper offers twelve principles on how to ruin a project, based on the author’s recent book looking at famous examples of project failure. Each of these principles can, by itself, go far toward ensuring that a project is destined to fail.