M1 – Why to projects fail – Tyler Livesey

There have been many businesses in the past that have failed whether this is by not enough money etc. But I have found that most projects that have failed have failed because there was not enough planning or the planning was bad or they made bad decisions. Here are a few of examples of projects that have failed and why.

One of the examples that I am going to talk about is the airbus A380, this is the world’s largest commercial aircraft with a wingspan larger than a football pitch and it also has 2 decks that hold 850 passengers. It is the most complex aircraft flying today and although we have been using these air crafts for 6 years it was supposed to be in operation in 2006 but was delayed by 2 years and they also went several billion dollars over budget. The main problem with this project were difficulties integrating the complex wiring system needed to operate the aircraft with the metal airframe through which the wiring needed to thread. The aircraft with 530KM of wires, cables and harnesses that weaved their through the airframe. With more than 100,000 wires and 40,300 connectors that are performing 1,150 different functions, the airbus has the most complex electrical system that has ever been designed. When the first airbus prototype was being manufactured it was soon began to realise that the wires and their harnesses were too short  by just a few centimetres, but in a aircraft you can’t just tug a wire to reach. As the construction on the prototype continued they found that it wasn’t just a few wires that were to short and all the wires were too short throughout the design. The reason that the designs were wrong was that the construction of the airbus was collaboration between 16 different sites which were located between 4 different countries. These countries are Germany, Spain, Brittan and France. The problem was that when designing the project Germany and Spain were using software called Computer Aided Design (CAD) version 4 and Brittan and France used version 5. Although there shouldn’t have been much difference between the two it should have worked but this is a good example that theory and practise is not always the same thing. The root of the problem can be traced back to the single decision to proceed with the project despite the fact that two different versions of CAD were being used on the design. If this business was not funded with a lot of money then the project would have failed completely and would not be in use today.

My second example is Woolworths. Woolworths was a big company that sold a wide range of things from sweets to games to clothing, Woolworths was a well-known store around the United Kingdom and always had a lot of customers, so why did it fail. When Woolworths was a big company back when it opened all the way until it closed, but the main problem was with its years of mismanagement. Woolworths failed to move with the times and in the end a lot of their customer’s left and started shopping at more dynamic and focused shops. Woolworths tried to compete with their rival companies but they did it in the wrong way and made poor decisions. They decided to open a new chain of Woolworth stores and called them ‘Big W’ this was a bad decision as the new chain offered nothing different apart from a few extra DVDs and a few extra tubes of sweets. I feel that Woolworths became outdated with the growth of online shopping and also more specialist shops started to boom, such as Game, W H Smiths, Waterstones etc. These shops sold everything that Woolworths did but they sold them on a larger scale and more efficient. Woolworths go them self in to debt and as the country went in to economic crisis Woolworth’s were asked to pay the money back in which they didn’t have. When they were in this position there were no buyers wanted to invest in Woolworth’s so the business folded.

My last example is HMV as HMV was definable a beloved store around Brittan and I’m sure everyone was shocked to see that it went in to administration. HMV’s administrators Deloitte did their best to try and keep at least some of the 238 of the world wide stores open and instead of all HMV employees losing their jobs they managed to save around 2,500 jobs by doing this. No one could see how such a big company that seemed to be doing fine went in to administration but when you think about it, I’m surprised that it didn’t close down sooner. With the growth of the internet online shopping is becoming more and more of a big thing when you can download an album from iTunes who wants to walk to HMV to buy a CD? As many people did want to buy the CD it didn’t make much of a difference with the amount of people who will just download their music. And this isn’t just for music as you can just go online and sign up to love film and you can watch a lot of the latest block busters on here for just a small fee. So what’s the point in going out to buy DVDS when you can just watch it all online? But it’s not just being taken over by online companies because as the internet grows so does the amount of people illegally downloading music and moves. But through this all companies lose out. When someone can download a Blu-ray copy of a film easier than going to the shop and buying, then why go out and buy it? There is also the issue that online shops do not stock everything in a shop, online shops hove huge warehouses to keep all of their goods. For example amazon has over 1.5 million books for sale this is a figure that cannot be matched by any high street outlet. There is always going to the other issue of actually going in to town to queue up behind the checkout to buy your product and if you took your car you also have to think about paying and dealing with busy car parks, it’s just so much hassle to go in to town when you can just go online and shop for everything.

As you can see there are a lot of reason why a project or company might fail it could be down to poor planning and overlooking things that should have been took in to consideration or at latest tested to see if there idea would work before jumping straight in to the project. Or it could just be poor management, trying to up your sales by spending money it’s better to make sure the money is going to be well spent and will get customers interested instead of just a bad idea that’s going to cost more money than its worth. And lastly the huge growth of the internet, knower days the internet is one of the biggest things out there and it’s going to be for a long while  and this is why a lot of high street companies die because they never saw the internet as a threat to their business.