The famous phrase is from the baseball movie popular in the 1990s called “Field of Dreams” starring Kevin Costner. The story is about Iowa farmer, Ray, who hears a voice telling him that “if you build it, he will come”. He followed the voice and eventually built a baseball field in the middle of his cornfield. The movie ended with a stream of cars heading to his field to enjoy the game.
Over the years, this phrase undergoes a subtle change to say “if you build it, they will come”. For some reason, people start using the phrase to say that if we do something, it will succeed, which is a great lie!
All of us want to believe in the happy ending a la Disney movies: if we start a business, we will make lot of money, if we post a video on YouTube or start a blog, it will become viral and we will be rich and famous, if we marry, we will live happily ever after – if we start a project, it will be successful.
Well, the real truth (and nothing but the truth) is that…projects fail, and many fail big time: (1) Data from McKinsey says 70% of transformation projects fail; (2) 75% of business and IT executives anticipate that their projects will fail, and (3) 70% of software projects will be late with 30% significantly late.
Even the Bible has a similar story: in the Parable of the Sower as told by Jesus, out of the 4 seeds that were sown, only one (the last one) is successful. Yep, 75% of the seeds failed!
Here are some main reasons for the failure:
Weak personal reason
Lack of commitment from superiors
Inadequate planning
Absence of use involvement
New and unfamiliar technology
I suspect that all will find the reasons familiar, because we all have seen in some form or another. In many cases, we did something because it seems like a good idea (at the time). Some also had the idea but we did not take action. Once we start doing the actual work, then we realized we may have bitten more than we can chew and things start to deteriorate and eventually die a uncomfortable death.
The good news is that this is not the end. If we put in the efforts and we follow some tried and tested processes honed over many years by experts, the chances of seeing success improves a lot.
Will share more in the next post.
To learn more, I have written a book describing the process: Partridge
