Best practices to prevent your projects from failing

For many project managers, success is not guaranteed. Missed deadlines, budget overruns, deliverables that fall short of expectations… The causes vary, but the consequences are always costly: wasted time, wasted resources, demotivated teams, and weakened trust among customers and stakeholders.

The 2024 data from the Project Management Institute confirms this reality: only 48% of projects achieve their objectives. Conversely, 12% fail completely and 40% fall somewhere in between, neither fully successful nor outright failures. In other words, more than one in two projects does not fully meet initial expectations.

Given this observation, project managers would be well advised to conduct an in-depth analysis of the reasons for these discrepancies. Identifying risks upstream, adjusting the trajectory along the way, and learning from projects that fail are powerful levers for avoiding recurring errors and improving performance in the long term.

In this article, we review the laws and causes of project failure and share best practices to adopt, including analyzing failed projects to identify levers for success.

6 essential laws you need to know to understand and avoid project failure

What is a failed project?

By extension, a project that fails is one that does not manage to create this value, whether due to insufficient results, excessive costs, or a gap between expectations and the final perception of stakeholders. Certain empirical laws observed in the world of work can explain frequent deviations. Knowing them is already a step toward taking action.

Pareto’s law: focus on the essentials

80% of effects are produced by 20% of causes.”

According to this law, a minority of causes generate the majority of results… or problems. Trying to treat everything equally disperses efforts.

• Example: 20% of your initiatives create 80% of the value, but you spend most of your time on the rest.
• Application of the law: identify the major levers (bottlenecks, recurring irritants, customer irritants) and prioritize high-impact actions instead of spreading resources everywhere.

Murphy’s Law: anticipating the unexpected

“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

This law is not a call for pessimism, but rather an encouragement to anticipate risks. In a project, the unexpected is not an exception: it must be factored in from the outset.

• Example: You schedule a technical switchover on a Friday evening without prior testing. An unexpected bug occurs… and you spend the entire weekend fixing it.
• Application of the law: Never underestimate the planning phase, document risks, plan for alternative scenarios, and set up alerts.

Parkinson’s law: setting binding deadlines

“The work is spread out so as to take up all the time available for its completion.”

The more time you allow, the more inertia and slowness you create in execution.

• Example: a steering committee gives itself a month to validate a simple decision… that could have been made in 30 minutes.
• Application of the law: set short and engaging milestones, establish regular rituals with intermediate deliverables.

Laborit’s law: tackling difficult tasks

“When faced with several tasks, humans tend to choose the most pleasant one.”

We naturally favor what is simple or rewarding, at the expense of complex but important issues.

• Example: spending the day answering emails rather than working on strategy.
• Application of the law: highlight strategic priorities, even uncomfortable ones, and create collective rituals for dealing with fundamental issues.

Illich’s law: limit overload

“Beyond a certain threshold, productivity declines.”

Taking on too many projects or tasks at once slows everyone down and reduces the quality of work.

• Example: a team manages 15 projects at once, without the actual capacity to do so. The result: everything moves slowly, nothing gets finished.
• Application of the law: limit the number of projects in progress and manage the workload according to the actual capacity of the teams.

Carlson’s law: maintaining concentration

“Continuous work is more effective than interrupted work.”

Each interruption requires a period of “mental recharging,” which slows overall efficiency.

• Example: an employee who is interrupted every 10 minutes takes 30 minutes to regain their level of concentration.
• Application of the law: block out periods of uninterrupted work and reduce ad hoc follow-ups in favor of well-defined key moments.

Summary table of essential laws to avoid project failure

In addition to these laws, it is equally important to identify the causes of failure that arise in the field, so that action can be taken before they compromise the success of a project.

7 most common causes of project failure in organizations

Certain problems regularly recur in projects that are running into difficulties. Identifying them quickly allows action to be taken before they compromise success. These are:

• Incorrect input data: vague objectives or incomplete initial information distort the trajectory from the outset, making any corrections difficult.
• Unclear or changing priorities: without alignment, teams get sidetracked by secondary tasks at the expense of critical actions.
• “Shadow” projects or duplicates: multiple teams work on similar initiatives without knowing it, wasting time and resources.
• Time-consuming and disjointed reporting: collecting and formatting information takes more time than performing the tasks themselves, creating frustration and errors.
• Lack of collaboration between teams: scattered exchanges across different channels lead to information loss and misunderstandings.
• Lack of visibility on progress: without a clear and shared view of the project status, decisions are made based on partial information, increasing the risk of deviation.
• Late or inconsistent decisions: the lack of clear governance slows down decision-making and causes costly reversals.

Minimizing these factors is essential to securing your projects and giving them the best chance of success. Let’s now look at some best practices for effectively limiting them.

Best practices for leading your projects to success

Reducing the risk of failure requires better preparation, rigorous management, and collaborative monitoring. Here are the key levers to put in place to maximize your chances of success:

• Clarify objectives and scope from the outset: ensure that all stakeholders share the same vision and priorities.
• Prioritize high-impact actions: focus energy and resources on what brings the most value to the project.
• Limit the number of parallel projects: avoid dispersion and ensure better allocation of resources.
• Set up visual and shared monitoring: use clear dashboards, relevant indicators, and early warnings to quickly detect deviations.
• Encourage active collaboration: centralize exchanges and documentation in a single space accessible to all.
• Monitor and regularly reassess risks: adjust the action plan according to changes in the context and unforeseen events.

Identify failed projects to turn them into opportunities

When a project fails, it is tempting to quickly move on to something else. However, it is often in these moments that the best lessons for the future can be found.

Documenting failed projects allows you to:

• Understand the root causes and avoid repeating the same mistakes;
• Capitalize on what has been learned: certain ideas, deliverables, or methods can be reused in other contexts;
• Identify weak signals: comparing successful and unsuccessful projects helps to identify indicators of deviation earlier on;
• Build trust and transparency: sharing these findings shows that the organization is learning and continuously improving.

With a structured and collaborative monitoring system, this capitalization becomes a real performance lever, transforming one-off failures into drivers of continuous improvement.

Using a collaborative solution such as IDhall

Implementing these best practices requires not only a methodical approach, but also the right tools. IDhall meets both of these requirements by offering a unique environment for:

• Centralize all initiatives and eliminate duplication;
• Capitalize on what has been learned through shared dashboards;
• Prioritize effectively by highlighting high-impact actions;
• Simplify reporting with real-time indicators;
• Foster collaboration between all stakeholders, wherever they are;
• Capitalize on experience by keeping a record of each project’s history and lessons learned.

By structuring monitoring and making information accessible to all, IDhall transforms project management into a sustainable lever for collective performance.

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