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Philip Leitch 

National President

&

Qld Chapter

President

Dear Members and Associates,

Welcome to a new year.  This year we intend to issue this newsletter more frequently and with expanded content.  As per usual, your input is welcomed.  

As we start out the New Year we've recently heard about the failures of the Federal Government's insulation scheme.   I thought it would timely to comment on issue of failing projects.  Towards the end of last year I saw a large number of project mistakes, some of which have been very expensive (approaching half a million dollars).

From what I have seen, there appears to be a number of simple factors that lead to the failing projects:

• Lack of quick decision making ability.  I met with a couple of engineers working on a project that later went over budget and over time.  The engineers had meetings all day Monday to plan out the week's work; and then more meetings every morning to discuss each aspect of the project.    The engineers left the organisation before long because they could see their engineering skills were not being utilised and nothing was getting done.  Projects need someone who can make quick decisions to ensure that the project doesn't get bogged down and stall.

• Lack of evidence based decisions.  I recently saw a $500K project implemented where a vast quantity of inventory was RFID tagged.  Only once the project was completed was it identified that the RFID tags could not withstand heat, and given the inventory was stored in the open, most tags would stop reading after about 10am on a sunny day.  Many tags have become so hot they no longer work at all.  This issue shouldn't have happened as even the most basic prototype or investigation of the manufacture's specifications would have stopped the project from proceeding.

• No root cause analysis.  When a problem occurs the problem needs to be fixed in the short term while the cause of the problem needs to be found and ameliorated in the long term.  This process should have occurred when the first reports of fires or electrocutions occurred with the Government's insulation programme.

• No/Little Oversight.  Larger projects should have oversight or governance to ensure the project is proceeding adequately.  I saw a large construction project that became tens of millions of dollars over budget simply because nobody had thought to re-calculate the project budget as the project proceeded.  The falling Australian dollar was never factored in to the project costs.

• Lack of project post-mortems.  Every project should be analysed at the end to find the points that worked and those that didn't so that future projects will be better informed.  An obvious example is where until recently the success or failure of previous Government military contracts had no bearing on the tender process for future contracts.  All organisations need to assess what has worked for them, what hasn't and what can be improved in the future.

This isn't a definitive list by any means, but these relatively simple issues which should be considered in order to reduce project failure.

Regards,

Philip Leitch

National President

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Total value of cash prizes awarded to GMA Award Winners since 2002  -  $30,350.

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Name

Chapter

School

Ms Renae Long

Qld

Southern Cross

Mrs Evgenia Obriadina

NSW

Paris School of Business