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The common term for all of these errors is "incompetence" (well, couldn't you say that about pretty much any error then?). But, to be competent, someone has to define what that means. So who can define "project management" ? I have browsed a few books on the topic over the years, and most of the are utterly vague. They describe projects, but not how to run them.

This text also largely ignores a simple fact of project work: Unpredictability. You can't predict how long time a project will take. Most people can't even precisely (within 10% accuracy) estimate how long time it will take to walk to the bus, train, grocery store etc. even though they've done it hundreds of times. That is, on a 5 minute walk you have to be accurate within 30 seconds. How can we expect to be accurate on projects spanning months or years?

Furthermore, what makes a project a failure? That the project is never completed? Or that it exceded budgets or deadline? Say you even make it on the deadline, perhaps the "real" success would have been to cut away even more functionality and launch earlier? Or what if budgest are exceeded by 10 %. but there was no way it could have been done any faster? A failure then?

Projects fail because what you thought was possible (or hoped was possible) turned out not to be possible. Could these 14 "mistakes" or solutions to them save your project? And more interestingly, what do you do in the situations where you *cannot* apply these solutions? Like if you can't hire new team members, or can't get the team to use a PM software tool, or can't get business and team members to communicate etc.... It's too easy to say that "you should have more effective this, more effective that, be good at this, be good at that...". But how do you assure this in reality?

In my opinion, most of the litterature I have come across on project management are just way too shallow. It touches the surface of project work, but never really digs into the gut of it.

Oh, and by the way, what IF you do all these 14 things right, but the project ends up taking twice as long, because you have to factory all this in? You complete on time, but you could have completed in perhaps 80% of the time/resources if you had gone with less ceremony? Is the project still a success?

... the article smells too much like it was written by a PM consultant trying to sell his/her services.

ah... damn... wrong article I am commenting on :-( ... it was an article on project management... please ignore/remove these comments from here.

Lol! Nice :)

I can't help but think there is something wrong when the database username/password is in a java source file.

That's a good point. It would be a VERY safe practice to pull out the user credentials into a secured configuration file, but it's not really in the scope of the tutorial. Someone want to add on? :),