Even in healthy organizations and on functional teams, projects can fail. It could be a lack of visibility, poorly-managed process, integration missteps, or any of a hundred other things. We’re all familiar with the immediate repercussions of failing software projects: lost revenue, delayed schedules, technical debt, etc. But, there are also less understood downstream issues which hamper or prevent full organizational and cultural recovery, even after individual project issues are addressed.

However, with some careful study, it’s possible to identify and prevent many of these cascading failures. We’ll examine the entire lifetime of a failing project: we’ll look at the leading indicators of danger so we can identify them sooner, we’ll discuss common root causes and mitigation strategies so we can deal with them more effectively, and we’ll propose some follow up strategies, so we can recover from organizational, technical, and cultural damage as soon as possible.