647 W2D "Three main reason projects fail" Essay

647 W2D "Three main reason projects fail" - Essay Example I believe that Newton MessagePad was an impossible project since it could not withstand the stiff competition in the market. Besides, it turned to be too expensive, too big and much difficult to use than earlier expected. So, it had to fail and bring such a bid loss to the company. On the other hand, Webvan’s online grocery supply project failed because of mismanagement. Although the project was launched at the beginning of the Dot-Com Bubble, it had to fail. Having keenly followed the events at this company, I concluded that the internet grocery supply project failed because it was poorly managed. This was evidenced in 1999 when the company hired George Shaheen as its new head. After his appointment, Shaheen did not help in developing the company. Instead, he came up with expansionist policies of building branches in 26 cities without considering market and strengthening the already existing outlets. At the same time, he did not establish an effective communication between the executive management, project managers and team members (Gomez-Mejia et al., 2008). As a result, the project tremendously failed in 2001 only after managing to reach up to 10 cities. Last, but not least, IBM’s IBM 7030 (Stretch) Project failed in 1964 after it was launched in 1961 because it was over constrained. Although the management of IBM had planned to invent the world’s fastest supercomputer, it could not manage to achieve this goal because the project was seriously challenged. Its experts could not make such a computer because they lacked the required resources and skills. This explains why they were able to build a computer with a speed of only 40 times faster, not 100 times as anticipated. Hence, the project failed after selling only 9 computers. Had it not been over constrained, the company would have accomplished its goal (Flyvbjerg,