case study project failure

10 Failed Projects: Examples and How You Can Avoid Making the Same Mistakes

Looking at these famous failed projects examples through the lens of a project manager , we can learn how to spot issues before they have a chance to derail our plans — and avoid our own project failures in the future.

From Betamax to Crystal Pepsi, here are some high-profile projects that didn’t turn out as planned.

In this failed projects guide you will discover:

• Ten famous projects that failed
• Five ways to spot project failures before they happen
• Frequently asked questions

10. Sony Betamax

Sony launched its cassette recording device known as Betamax in the mid-1970s. It lost the battle for market share to JVC’s VHS technology, but Sony didn’t stop making Betamax tapes until 2016. In the age of online streaming, very few us realized it was still in production.

Lessons learned:

The story of Betamax has become nearly synonymous with failed marketing because while it was innovative and hit the market before its competition did, other products proved to be cheaper and better.

The lesson learned here is that project management doesn’t end when a project is launched, or a campaign has run its course. To stop your idea from hitting the ashpile of failed projects, remember to keep analyzing, and evaluating your products. That way, they can maintain their velocity and continue to benefit your bottom line.

9. New Coke

After testing a new recipe on 200,000 subjects and finding that people preferred it over the traditional version, Coca-Cola unveiled New Coke in 1985. That sounds like a safe move, right? Wrong.

Product loyalty and old-fashioned habit got in the way and people didn’t buy New Coke as expected, costing the company $4 million in development and a loss of $30 million in back stocked product it couldn’t sell and becoming one of the most famous failed project case studies in history.

While Coca-Cola certainly did market research, they missed the mark when it comes to assessing customer motivations. Customer input is imperative in development and for your project to be successful, you need to ensure you have a way to gather comprehensive customer insight that gives accurate and realistic information.

8. Polaroid Instant Home Movies

With the Polavision you could record video, develop it in a matter of minutes, and then watch it immediately! It was groundbreaking at the time, but the two-and-a-half-minute time limit, lack of sound, and the fact that you couldn’t watch the videos on your regular TV meant this project lasted just two years .

The Polavision was revolutionary, but Polaroid dropped the ball when they failed to stay abreast of developing marketing needs. When you keep your finger on the pulse of your market, you’re ready to innovate to meet its needs and avoid project failure.

7. Crystal Pepsi

Crystal Pepsi was a hit at first, and people were excited about the new version of an old favorite. But people soon lost interest and the novelty wore off, making it impossible for Crystal Pepsi to gain a strong market share.

David Novak was the COO of PepsiCo during the project and didn’t listen when bottlers told him the Crystal Pepsi flavor wasn’t quite right. “I learned there that you have to recognize that when people are bringing up issues, they might be right,” he later said .

6. McDonald's Arch Deluxe Burger

In 1996, McDonald’s put more than $150 million into advertising — more than it had ever spent on an ad campaign — for its new Arch Deluxe Burger, only to find out its customers weren’t interested in the more grown-up, sophisticated menu option.

This is another case that highlights the importance of letting customer data drive product strategy. If McDonald’s had a more accurate picture of what its customers wanted, it could have saved millions in advertising and resources.

A great way to stay on top of data is to choose a handful of key metrics to track , make sure your tools can accurately track them in as close to real-time as possible, and then always strategize based on the numbers.

5. Apple Lisa

Lisa, the first desktop with a mouse, cost $10,000 (almost $24,000 today) and had just 1 MB of RAM. Consumers weren’t as interested as Apple anticipated, and it was a case of overpromising and under-delivering , as the 1983 ads — featuring Kevin Costner — depicted the Lisa as much more than it really was.

Transparency matters. It may feel like a buzzword you hear all the time, but there’s no better way to describe the lesson learned here other than to say that Apple was not transparent enough about the Lisa.

We no longer live in an age where you can falsify the capabilities of a product because social media makes it easier for the truth to come out and word of mouth will eventually catch up to — and destroy — projects that lack transparency

4. Levi Type 1 Jeans

While we don’t know what Levi’s project management processes are like, one way to avoid confusion is to improve internal communications so the final product has a clear message and is easily understood by end-users.

To stop your project becoming a failure case study, avoid email and spreadsheets and instead, try an operational system of record to communicate, get status updates, and track document versions.

3. IBM PCjr

IBM released its PCjr in 1983 in an attempt to attract home computer users, but the PCjr offered fewer features than its competitors and was twice as expensive as an Atari or Commodore. After customers complained about the low-quality keyboard, IBM offered an alternative, which had its own issues, and couldn’t revive interest in the PCjr

IBM had the right approach when it listened to users and provided what they were asking for: a new keyboard. Unfortunately, its response wasn’t quite enough because the product was low quality and didn’t help improve users’ experience with the PCjr.

When you listen to your market, especially in times of crisis, it’s imperative that you hit it out of the park with your response in a way that not only saves your project but inspires even more brand loyalty with extremely satisfied customers.

2. The DeLorean DMC-12

Even the futuristic shape, gull-wing doors, and gold-plated models weren’t enough to save the DeLorean DMC-12, which experienced problems throughout production, giving it a rough start.

Then, John DeLorean, the company’s founder, was arrested in 1982 on drug trafficking charges he incurred while trying to raise money to save the business. Even though he was found not guilty, it was too late for the Marty McFly-famous car.

This one is still playing out but is a great example of leveraging nostalgia and coming back bigger and better. Or in this case, faster and more powerful.

In 2016, a new DeLorean was announced and then delayed due to some legal issues. However, things are back on track for an early 2019 release with an updated interior, more powerful engine, and faster speeds. In some cases, a do-over can tap into a niche market and bring a project back from the brink of failure for a successful refresh.

1. The Ford Edsel

The Ford Edsel is the perfect example of the importance of speed to market and how even a major brand and product can fail if a project loses velocity. Things like poor communication, inaccurate deadlines, and out-of-touch project managers can majorly slow a project down, to the point that it’s no longer relevant or valuable.

Robert Kelly , services solution executive, global accounts at Lenovo and project management expert explained the importance of maintaining an accurate project schedule: “Even with the best planning and collaboration, things happen. Make sure your project schedule reflects the actual and current reality of the project.”

Five ways to spot project failures before they happen.

When you read about project management failure case studies like these, it’s hard to see how the creatives and strategists who hatched the plans dropped the ball.

While the market is unpredictable and hindsight is always 20/20, there are a few common factors in failed projects that we can all learn from.

1. Low interest

People stop showing up for meetings. Stakeholders stop participating or giving timely feedback. Tasks stop getting completed on time. All of these are signs that interest in a project is flagging.

How to stop it: Keep communications as up to date as possible. Track all assignments. Hold all assignees accountable . If stakeholders stop caring about a project, hold a sit-down to determine the current perceived value of your project to the organization.

2. Poor communication

The team doesn't know when things are getting done, what's not getting done, or why it's not getting done. The project lead isn't communicating changes to the rest of the team. When communications do go out, they are either late or inaccurate.

How to stop it: While email and spreadsheets are okay for getting basic information out, they tend to be slower and more cumbersome than the typical fast-moving team needs. Consider purchasing tools like Adobe Workfront that automate communications as much as possible.

3. Lack of velocity

Assignments are long past due, stalled on the approval of an elusive stakeholder. Maybe team members are spending more and more time on other projects. At any rate, contrary to your best projected completion dates, your project has come to a full stop.

How to stop it: See the solution to lack of interest. Accountability is especially key here. Ensure that everyone is aware of their assignments and their due dates and then press them to meet them. If stakeholders are holding a project up, call them, if possible, to find out if there are any issues.

4. A “no bad news” environment

Individual reports in meetings are especially rosy and don't match the chaos that seems to be engulfing a project. Staff members avoid questions asking for progress updates and project leaders seem to be in the dark about why tasks are being done late, or not at all.

How to stop it: Let numbers rule. Your team should be guided by a handful of key metrics that you can track, such as on-time delivery rate. And then make sure your tools can accurately track those metrics in as close to real time as possible.

5. Scope creep

The project starts to barely resemble the requirements as they were given at its outset. Timelines have stretched beyond the original projections. The phrase, "You know what would be really cool would be if we added ________," is uttered during the review and approval phase. This is scope creep — and you need to avoid it.

How to stop it: Use an airtight requirements gathering process before the project starts. In fact, don't even allow the project to start until you, your team, your stakeholders, and your requestor are all on the same page. And then treat that requirements doc like a binding contract.

In the end, the best way to avoid project failure (and embarrassing flops) is to stay one step ahead of your project and keep safeguards like these in place, so you can quickly pivot, producing a successful outcome regardless of what obstacles may arise.

Frequently asked questions about project failures.

What is a failed project?

A project can be seen as a failure when it doesn’t achieve its objectives. This doesn’t just mean overall goals – a failed project could be something that went overbudget, over deadline or lost the support of its staff and stakeholders. By thoroughly planning your project and monitoring from start to finish, you can help ensure your project is a success.

What can we learn from a failed project?

Plenty! The main thing to take away is that these projects fell mainly because of poor communication along the way. Setting up your projects to automate as much of your communication as possible is key, and having everyone aware of certain key metrics will ensure positivity and morale is always high.

How do I recover from a failed project?

Having one failed project does not mean your company or idea is a failure. Learn from the mistakes made in the project that failed and start from the beginning, making those all-important changes along the way.

Gustavo’s The Business Automator

The Anatomy of a Failed IT Project: Case Studies and Lessons Learned

Failure is an uncomfortable word. However, it's important to remember that failure is not the end but rather a learning opportunity , in IT and Project Management, understanding what went wrong can often be as valuable as knowing what goes right. This blog post aims to dissect my real-world cases of failed IT projects to extract actionable lessons for future endeavours.

The Importance of Studying Failures

Before diving into my case studies, let me address a crucial question:

Why should we study failures?

The simple answer is to avoid making the same mistakes, when we understand the reasons behind a project's failure, we're better equipped to mitigate those issues in future projects; the goal is not to blame nor point to anyone but to understand, adapt, and improve.

Case Study 1: Scope Creep

Let's start with a project that was initially scoped to develop a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for a mid-sized company within six months.

What Went Wrong

As the project progressed, additional features were requested, the client's demands changed and suddenly the team was overwhelmed. Deadlines were missed, and the budget ballooned.

Lessons Learned

The primary lesson here is the importance of a well-defined project scope. Any changes to the scope should be carefully considered , involving all stakeholders, and adjustments to resources and timelines should be made accordingly.

Case Study 2: Poor Communication

This case involves a project aimed at implementing a new security infrastructure for a financial institution.

The project suffered from a lack of clear communication. Requirements were misunderstood, leading to incorrect implementations and eventual rework. Critical updates were not effectively communicated to all team members for “watertight compartments“ causing further delays.

Effective communication is the backbone of any successful project. Regular team meetings, clear documentation, and established communication protocols can prevent many issues related to misunderstandings or lack of information.

Case Study 3: Inadequate Risk Management

This case study focuses on a software development project for a healthcare provider.

The project did not have a comprehensive risk management plan. When the team encountered issues like third-party API limitations and unexpected data privacy concerns, there were no contingency plans in place.

Risk management is not a one-time activity but a continuous process. Always have contingency plans for identified risks and update your risk assessments as the project progresses.

Common Themes

After examining these case studies, some common themes emerge, lack of planning and foresight, poor communication and inadequate risk management, but actually there are different common reasons:

Scope Creep

The project starts with a well-defined scope, but as it progresses, additional features or functionalities are added, usually without sufficient adjustments to the budget or timeline.

Poor Communication

A lack of clear, effective communication among stakeholders, team members, and clients can lead to misunderstandings, delayed decisions, and ultimately, project failure.

Inadequate Requirements

Often, project specifications are either too vague or incomplete. This ambiguity can result in a final product that does not meet the needs of the end-users.

Lack of User Involvement

Ignoring the needs and feedback of the end-users during the project can result in a product that is misaligned with market needs.

Technical Debt

Cutting corners in coding or design and/or project management might save time initially but usually leads to more work in the long term , as these issues need to be resolved later.

Overconfidence

Underestimating the complexity of a project or overestimating the team's capabilities can set the project on a path to failure from the outset.

Launching the project at a time when the market or the organization is not ready can doom even a well-executed project.

Resource Constraints

the worst one, the final conclusion: running out of time, money, or manpower can halt a project in its tracks.

My suggestions

To avoid the pitfalls highlighted in these case studies, consider the following recommendations:

Effective Planning: Ensure the project scope is well-defined and agreed upon by all stakeholders.

Clear Communication: Establish robust communication channels and protocols.

Continuous Risk Assessment: Regularly update your risk assessments and have contingency plans in place.

Remember, the goal is not to blame but to learn. As Project management giant Harold Kerzner once said:

Project management is not about managing projects but about managing expectations.

Understanding the reasons behind failures helps us set realistic expectations and equips us to manage future projects better.

Literature and more info

- Project Management Institute (PMI)

- Scrum Training

- Risk Management Guidelines

Gustavo’s The Business Automator is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Ready for more?

• Contact sales

Start free trial

12 Notorious Failed Projects & What We Can Learn from Them

Failure is an unavoidable part of any project process: it’s the degree of failure that makes the difference. If a task fails, there are ways to reallocate resources and get back on track. But a systemic collapse will derail the whole project.

Why Is It Important to Analyze Failed Projects?

What good can come from failure? A lot, actually. Sometimes a project reaches too far beyond its means and fails, which is unfortunate but can also serve as a teaching moment. If project managers don’t learn from their mistakes, then they’re not growing professionally and will revisit the same problem in future projects.

Project managers can learn as much, if not more, from failed projects as they can from successful ones. A post-mortem analysis should be part of any project plan, and especially so when a project crashes and burns. There are valuable lessons in those ashes.

One lesson is that project management software decreases the chance of a failed project. ProjectManager is award-winning project management software that allows you to monitor your work in real time to make more insightful decisions that can keep failure at bay. Use our real-time dashboards to track the health of your project, including such important key performance indicators (KPIs) as time, cost and more. There’s no time-consuming setup required as with lightweight software. Our dashboard is ready when you are. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.

12 Top Failed Projects from History

Let’s look at the most notorious failed projects, not to gloat, but to see what they can tell us about project management .

1. Sony Betamax

The word Betamax has become almost synonymous with failure. But when it was first released, Betamax was supposed to become the leader in the cassette recording industry. Developed by Sony, Betamax was introduced in the mid-1970s but was unable to get traction in the market, where JVC’s VHS technology was king.

Surprisingly, Sony continued to produce Betamax all the way into 2016. Long before it discontinued the technology, Betamax was already irrelevant.

Betamax was an innovative product, and it even got to market before VHS. But soon the market had options that were cheaper and better than Betamax, making it a failed project. Sony’s mistake was thinking that the project was complete once the product went to market . Project managers need to always follow up on their work, analyze the data and make an evaluation about what needs to be done to keep the project relevant.

2. New Coke

Coca-Cola is one of the most iconic brands in the world. It’d take a lot to tarnish that reputation. But that’s just what happened when New Coke was introduced in 1985. People didn’t know why the Coke they loved and drank regularly was being replaced.

The company knew why. They were looking to improve quality and make a splash in the marketplace. The fact is, New Coke sunk like a stone. It wasn’t like New Coke was just released without doing market research , though it might seem that way. In fact, the new recipe was tested on 200,000 people, who preferred it to the older version.

But after spending $4 million in development and losing another $30 million in backstocked products, the taste for New Coke evaporated. Consumers can be very loyal to a product, and once they get into a habit, it can be very difficult to break them off it in favor of something different.

It’s not that Coca-Cola neglected market research to see if there was a need to develop a new product, but they were blind to their own customers’ motivations. New Coke was a failed project because the researchers needed to do more than a mere taste test.

They needed to understand how people would react when the familiar Coke they loved would be discontinued and replaced by a shiny new upstart. Market research must be handled like a science and an art—and worked into the project plan accordingly.

3. Pepsi Crystal

In 1992, Pepsi launched Pepsi Crystal. It was a unique soft drink in that there was no color. It was as clear as water. Pepsi hoped to take advantage of the growing trend for purity and health. Pepsi marketed the new drink as pure, caffeine-free and an alternative to the unhealthy traditional colas.

At first, sales looked good. The first year saw about $470 million in sales. Consumers were curious to find out if the taste was the same as Pepsi, which it was. Other colorless soft drinks started to introduce themselves to the market, such as 7Up and Sprite. But what Pepsi and the copycats didn’t take into account was how much sight influences flavor. Consumers found the product bland and sales tanked.

Pepsi Crystal was mocked on Saturday Night Live and Time Magazine listed it in its top-10 marketing failures of the 20th century.

Pepsi made the mistake of ignoring all the senses that are involved in the consummation of their product. They should have done more testing. If so, they would have realized the importance of the look of the product. Pepsi Crystal thought that a clear-looking liquid would indicate a healthy one, but what was registered by the majority of users was a bland one.

4. Ford Edsel

Ford released its Edsel model in 1957. Since then, the name has become synonymous with project planning failure. That’s an accomplishment, but not the type that Ford was hoping for. This was supposed to be the car for the middle class and Ford invested $250 million into the Edsel.

Ford ended up losing $350 million on the gas-guzzler that the public found an unattractive alternative to other cars on the market. Part of the problem was that the first Edsels had oil leaks, hoods that stuck, trunks that wouldn’t open and more issues that soured consumer confidence in the product.

The Ford was a lesson in egos at the company ignoring what the research was telling them. Ford conducted many polls to find out what Americans wanted in a car, including a name. But executives went with Edsel. The design of the car didn’t even consult the polls.

If you’re going to do polling on what the public wants, it is a poor decision to ignore that data . So much time and effort went into coming up with the name, even hiring modernist poet Marianne Moore (who came up with nothing marketable), that Ford neglected to determine if there was even a market for this new car.

5. Airbus A380

Boeing’s Airbus A380 was viewed as a way for the company to outdo the 747. It spent more than $30 billion on product development in the belief that the industry would embrace a bigger plane that could hold more passengers and increase revenue.

In fact, the Airbus A380 has sold well short of its predicted 1200 units. The plane was headed for the scrap heap as it faced obstacles such as airports having to build special infrastructure and gates to accommodate that massive plane. Those project costs would be handed back to the airlines. That’s going to sour the deal and it did.

Then there were the technical issues. Qantas had to ground its entire A380 fleet after an engine blew up. You’d think that engineers would have thought beyond having more passengers seated on a bigger plane. But they didn’t.

The biggest lesson is that just because you build it doesn’t mean that anyone is going to want it. There wasn’t the demand Boeing believed there to be. Industries and markets are fickle. Just because airlines say they want something today doesn’t mean they’ll want it tomorrow. Boeing should have hedged its bets.

6. World Athletics Championships 2019

Doha is the capital of Qatar and the site of the World Athletics Championships in 2019. The world’s best athletes went there to compete against one another, but the big event turned out to be an even bigger dud.

The problem was that the host nation was unable to sell most of the tickets to the event. Some of the greatest athletes in the world were forced to compete in stadiums that were nearly empty. It was a failure and an embarrassment.

Money is needed to plan for an event , but that investment is no guarantee that people will show up. The mistake was thinking there was a large enough fanbase to sell all the tickets. We keep coming back to this, but it deserves to be mentioned again: research is critical. It wouldn’t have taken much to determine if there were enough interested people to bring a return on the investment.

7. Garden Bridge

Vanity projects tend not to care about success or failure. They’re driven by ego and such was the case with the Garden Bridge. It was the brainchild of Boris Johnson when he was Mayor of London.

This construction project cost 53 million pounds, which is a lot of money, especially when considering it was never even built. The idea of a bridge made of gardens for city dwellers to enjoy is fine, but the over-optimistic fundraising targets and the ballooning costs led to its spectacular failure.

Projects must be realistic. It’s good to remember SMART goals , which is an acronym for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. If the project followed those constraints it might have been built or passed on before all that money was spent.

8. Apple Lisa

Before Apple became synonymous with the personal computer (and long before popular products such as the iPhone), it released Lisa. It costs $10,000 with a processor of 5 MHz and 1 MB of RAM. The first model sold only 10,000 units.

Lisa was fated to fail because it was really a prototype. It was marketed as a game-changer in 1983 from its popular, but command-line-based Apple II. The price is certainly one reason why this was not a realistic personal computer, but there were technical issues. It had an operating system that could run multiple programs but was too powerful for its processor. Lisa ran sluggishly.

The truth is Lisa was less a failure than an expensive lesson. Lisa led to the Macintosh, which was basically a less expensive and more effective version of Lisa. The lesson here is that one can learn from failure if it doesn’t bankrupt the company, that is.

9. Dyson Electric Car

After four years and millions of dollars, James Dyson canceled his electric car project. It took that long to realize it wasn’t commercially viable. There is certainly a growing market for electric cars as the industry is motivated by consumers and government regulations to move from fossil fuels to more energy-efficient and sustainable alternatives.

There’s a boom in the production of electric cars, from major manufacturers such as Chrysler and Ford to startups such as Tesla. But sometimes the time isn’t right and no matter how good the idea is, it’s just not meant to be.

Timing is everything. But it’s also important to note how difficult it is to penetrate a market with established players. It takes a lot of capital and manufacturing expertise to start a car company and be competitive.

Related: 10 Free Manufacturing Excel Templates

10. Stretch Project

The Stretch project was initiated in 1956 by a group of computer scientists at IBM who wanted to build the world’s fastest supercomputer. The result of this five-year project was the IBM 7030, also known as Stretch. It was the company’s first transistorized supercomputer.

Though Stretch could handle a half-million instructions per second and was the fastest computer in the world up to 1964, the project was deemed a failure. Why? The project’s goal was to create a computer 100 times faster than what it was built to replace. Stretch was only about 30-40 times faster.

The planned budget was $13.5 million, but the price dropped to $7.8 million; so the computer was at least completed below cost. Only nine supercomputers were built.

While the project was a failure in that it never achieved the goal it set, there was much IBM could salvage from the project. Stretch introduced pipelining, memory protection, memory interleaving and other technologies that helped with the development of future computers.

Creative work is rooted in failure specifically because of the serendipitous discovery that occurs. This was a creative project, which might not have met its paper objective, but created a slew of useful technologies. So, aim for your goal, and who knows what good things you’ll discover along the way.

Get your free

Lessons Learned Template

Use this free Lessons Learned Template for Excel to manage your projects better.

11. Challenger Space Shuttle

The worst failure is one that results in the loss of life. When you’re dealing with highly complex and dangerous projects like NASA, there’s always a tremendous risk that needs to be tracked . On January 28, 1986, that risk became a horrible reality as the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch.

The cause was a leak in one of the two solid rocket boosters that set off the main liquid fuel tank. The NASA investigation that followed said the failure was due to a faulty designed O-ring seal and the cold weather at launch, which allowed for the leak.

But it was not only a technical error that NASA discovered but human error. NASA officials went ahead with the launch even though engineers were concerned about the safety of the project. The engineers noted the risk of the O-ring, but their communications never traveled up to managers who could have delayed the launch to ensure the safety of the mission and its astronauts.

Managers are only as well-informed as their team. If they’re not opening lines of communication to access the data on the frontlines of a project, mistakes will be made, and in this case, fatal ones.

12. Computerized DMV

No one loves the DMV. If they were a brand, their reputation would be more than tarnished, it’d be buried. But everyone who drives a vehicle is going to have some interaction with this government agency. Unfortunately, they didn’t help their case in the 1990s when the states of California and Washington attempted to computerize their Departments of Motor Vehicles.

In California, the project began in 1987 as a five-year, $27 million plan to track its 31 million drivers’ licenses and 38 million vehicle registrations. Problems started at the beginning when the state solicited only one bid for the contract, Tandem Computers, locking the state into buying their hardware.

Then, to make things worse, tests showed that the new computers were even slower than the ones they were to replace. But the state moved forward with the project until 1994 when it had to admit failure and end the project. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the project cost the state $49 million, and a state audit found that the DMV violated contracting laws and regulations.

The problem here is a project that isn’t following regulations. All projects must go through a process of due diligence, and legal and regulatory constraints must be part of that process. If the state had done that and the contract bidding process invited more than one firm to the table, then a costly mess could have been avoided, and our wait at the DMV might actually have become shorter.

How ProjectManager Prevents Failed Projects

ProjectManager keeps your projects from failing with a suite of project management tools that shepherd your project from initiation to a successful close. Plan, schedule and track work, while managing teams, with our online software.

Plan Every Last Detail

Successful projects begin with a strong plan. But it can be hard to keep all those tasks and due dates working together on a realistic schedule. What if some tasks are dependent? It gets complicated. But ProjectManager has an online Gantt chart that plots your tasks across a project timeline, linking dependencies and breaking projects into digestible milestones.

Track Progress as It Happens

ProjectManager keeps you on track with high-level monitoring via its real-time dashboard and more detailed data with one-click reporting . Now when projects start to veer off-track, you can get them back on course quickly.

While we didn’t have an example, there are many projects that fail because they’re not equipped with the right tools for the job. ProjectManager is online project management software that gives project managers and their teams everything they need to plan, monitor and report on their project. Don’t let your next project fail; try ProjectManager with this free 30-day trial .

Deliver your projects on time and under budget

Start planning your projects.

• Resource Portfolio Management
• What-If Scenario Planning
• Integrations for Resource Management
• Strategy Execution
• Strategic Portfolio Management
• Adaptive Project Management
• Resource Management Capabilities: Tempus Resource
• HR Workforce Agility
• Audit Resource Management
• Tempus Insight+
• Portfolio Kanban
• Program & Project Management
• Project Financial Management
• Business Intelligence Project Management Reporting
• Project Management Spreadsheets
• Resource Management
• Resource Forecasting Tools and Techniques
• Resource Management Request Workflows
• Skills & Competency Management
• Scenario Planning
• Project Scheduling
• Microsoft Project Add-In
• Project Intake
• Case Studies
• Infographics
• Press Releases
• Whitepapers
• Help Center
• In the News

4 Famous Project Management Failures and What to Learn from Them

October 8, 2018 | by greg bailey.

Every project begins with a single idea or goal, and the best of intentions. But as they progress, mistakes are made, communications break down, and deadlines and budgets change. It’s these problems that mean, even when projects are started for the right reasons,  55% of businesses experience failed projects. In fact, 17% of large-scale IT projects  go so badly that they threaten the very existence of the company.

Why do projects fail? And what leads to a failed project? This post will look at some project failure examples, including the worst-case scenarios, to identify the root cause of the problem, in the hope that we can ensure project managers don’t make the same fatal mistakes.

1. Ford Edsel

Ford Edsel is one of the most spectacular project failure examples in automotive history. Ford ’s team did extensive market research before it released the Edsel , even doing studies to make sure the car had the right ‘personality’ to attract the ideal customer . They spent 10 years and $250 million on research and planning—but by the time all this was completed, and the car was unveiled in 1957, Ford had missed its chance. The market had already moved on to buying compact cars, which didn’t include the Edsel.

Lessons learned: The Ford Edsel is the perfect fail project example that emphasizes the importance of speed to market and how even a major brand and product can fail if a project loses velocity. Poor communication and inaccurate deadlines can slow a project down to the point where it’s no longer relevant or valuable,  let alone successful.

Paying ultimate attention to areas like resource availability and utilization—ensuring project workers are working to capacity and to the best of their ability—creates more accurate project timeline estimations and stops projects from dragging.

2. NHS Civilian IT

Back in 2007, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) looked to revolutionize the way technology is used in the health sector, through the introduction of electronic health records, digital scanning, and integrated IT systems across hospitals and community care. They called it the ‘Civilian Computer System. ’ It would have been the largest of its kind in the world. But it failed because of contractual changes—including changing specifications, supplier disputes, and technical problems. Estimates of the cost of the now-abandoned project hover around the £11.4 billion mark.

Lessons learned: Change is almost inevitable during the course of a project, especially with large and complex ones like the NHS undertook. This is one of the most talked-about project failure examples that shows the importance of flexibility for achieving great results. You need to be able to react to changes as they occur, but also preemptively identify potential problems in order to stop them before they wreak havoc.

Project and resource modeling allows project managers to create a model where they can test, in real-time, the effects of changing or modifying their projects to keep ahead of schedule. So even in the event of unexpected changes, you’re prepared for what’s next.

3. Airbus A380

Building the Airbus A380—the world’s largest commercial aircraft at the time—required production facilities from across the globe to build individual parts of the airplane. Unfortunately, these teams used different computer-aided design (CAD) programs. During installation, they discovered the parts designed by different teams didn’t fit together. This cost the company $6 billion to put right and set the project back two years.

Lessons learned: The Airbus A380 is one of those failed projects examples that teach you the importance of proper workforce coordination. Unexpected problems will always be a challenge, but there are added challenges when your workforce is based remotely or in silos. For instance, it can take longer to report problems and coordinate the right response. If Airbus’s dispersed project teams had better-prioritized communication, the problem could have been solved before the installation phase, before it was too late.

When teams work across geographies, it’s important to set goals and metrics to ensure everyone understands their tasks, like what they’re expected to achieve and when. Resource management allows you to manipulate resource data in real time, so, if something goes wrong, the problem can be resolved as soon as possible. Using remote workers makes it difficult to gather everyone in a room, explain the problem, and find the solution. Resource management tools provide real-time reporting for full visibility over your resources, so you can instantly enact change.

4. Knight Capital

In 2012, when Knight Capital was brought on to work on new code for a new SEC program, an over-optimistic deadline caused them to go to production with test code. After production, a glitch cost the company  $440 million within the first 30 minutes of trading , and company stock fell 75% within just two days.

Lessons learned: You need a granular-level view of your projects to forecast how long a project will feasibly take to complete and avoid setting unrealistic targets or deadlines. Resource management is crucial in analyzing and utilizing project resources, so projects can be completed as efficiently as possible without the need to rush work or take shortcuts.

Avoid famous project management failure with resource management

The project failure examples listed above were carried out on a monumental scale—involving a sea of moving parts and relied on a lot of people to complete. While no project can guarantee success, resource management can help measure and manage the moving parts of a project. The right resource management solution can help a project manager gain more control over their projects , providing insight into every step of the process .

Tempus Resource is a sophisticated resource management software that includes practical functionality like modeling, forecasting and ‘What-If?’ analysis. Tempus Resource can help organizations of any size and any level of project maturity reduce the risk of project failure.

To find out more on how resource management can reduce the risk of project failure,  get in touch with ProSymmetry today .

Subscribe to our Blog

Be the first to know when we post new content!

Ready to get started?

Related resources:, secrets to strategic portfolio delivery.

Strategic planning and execution has become a central part of the portfolio…

What is Audit Resource Management?

Internal audits are a complex process with a plethora of moving parts…

How Can Resource Planning Help With Scope Creep?

Scope creep, where a project grows beyond its original objectives, often leads…

Tempus Resource Year-End Checklist

Q4 is well under-way, and it’s time to start thinking about all…

ProSymmetry LLC

2000 Auburn Drive, Suite 460

Beachwood, OH 44122

© 2024 ProSymmetry. All Rights Reserved

• Generative AI
• Office Suites
• Collaboration Software
• Productivity Software
• Augmented Reality
• Emerging Technology
• Remote Work
• Artificial Intelligence
• Operating Systems
• IT Leadership
• IT Management
• IT Operations
• Cloud Computing
• Computers and Peripherals
• Data Center
• Enterprise Applications
• Vendors and Providers
• United States
• Netherlands
• United Kingdom
• New Zealand
• Newsletters
• Foundry Careers
• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Member Preferences
• About AdChoices
• E-commerce Affiliate Relationships
• Your California Privacy Rights

Our Network

• Network World

IT’s biggest project failures — and what we can learn from them

Think your project's off track and over budget? Learn a lesson or two from the tech sector's most infamous project flameouts.

Every year, the Improbable Research organization hands out Ig Nobel prizes to research projects that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

For example, this year’s Ig Nobel winners , announced last week, include a prize in nutrition to researchers who electronically modified the sound of a potato chip to make it appear crisper and fresher than it really is and a biology prize to researchers who determined that fleas that live on a dog jump higher than fleas that live on a cat. Last year, a team won for studying how sheets become wrinkled.

That got us thinking: Though the Ig Nobels haven’t given many awards to information technology (see No Prize for IT for reasons why), the history of information technology is littered with projects that have made people laugh — if you’re the type to find humor in other people’s expensive failures. But have they made us think? Maybe not so much. “IT projects have terrible track records. I just don’t get why people don’t learn,” says Mark Kozak-Holland, author of Titanic Lessons for IT Projects (that’s Titanic as in the ship, by the way).

When you look at the reasons for project failure, “it’s like a top 10 list that just repeats itself over and over again,” says Holland, who is also a senior business architect and consultant with HP Services . Feature creep? Insufficient training? Overlooking essential stakeholders? They’re all on the list — time and time again.

A popular management concept these days is “failing forward” — the idea that it’s OK to fail so long as you learn from your failures. In the spirit of that motto and of the Ig Nobel awards, Computerworld presents 11 IT projects that may have “failed” — in some cases, failed spectacularly — but from which the people involved were able to draw useful lessons.

You’ll notice that many of them are government projects. That’s not necessarily because government fails more often than the private sector, but because regulations and oversight make it harder for governments to cover up their mistakes. Private enterprise, on the other hand, is a bit better at making sure fewer people know of its failures.

So here, in chronological order, are Computerworld ‘s favorite IT boondoggles, our own Ig Nobels. Feel free to laugh at them — but try and learn something too.

IBM’s Stretch project

In 1956, a group of computer scientists at IBM set out to build the world’s fastest supercomputer. Five years later, they produced the IBM 7030 — a.k.a. Stretch — the company’s first transistorized supercomputer, and delivered the first unit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1961. Capable of handling a half-million instructions per second, Stretch was the fastest computer in the world and would remain so through 1964.

Nevertheless, the 7030 was considered a failure. IBM’s original bid to Los Alamos was to develop a computer 100 times faster than the system it was meant to replace, and the Stretch came in only 30 to 40 times faster. Because it failed to meet its goal, IBM had to drop Stretch’s price to $7.8 million from the planned $13.5 million, which meant the system was priced below cost. The company stopped offering the 7030 for sale, and only nine were ever built.

That wasn’t the end of the story, however. “A lot of what went into that effort was later helpful to the rest of the industry,” said Turing Award winner and Stretch team member Fran Allen at a recent event marking the project’s 50th anniversary. Stretch introduced pipelining, memory protection, memory interleaving and other technologies that have shaped the development of computers as we know them.

Lesson learned

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even if you don’t meet your project’s main goals, you may be able to salvage something of lasting value from the wreckage.

Knight-Ridder’s Viewtron service

The Knight-Ridder media giant was right to think that the future of home information delivery would be via computer. Unfortunately, this insight came in the early 1980s, and the computer they had in mind was an expensive dedicated terminal.

Knight-Ridder launched its Viewtron version of videotex — the in-home information-retrieval service — in Florida in 1983 and extended it to other U.S. cities by 1985. The service offered banking, shopping, news and ads delivered over a custom terminal with color graphics capabilities beyond those of the typical PC of the time. But Viewtron never took off: It was meant to be the the “McDonald’s of videotex” and at the same time cater to upmarket consumers, according to a Knight-Ridder representative at the time who apparently didn’t notice the contradictions in that goal.

A Viewtron terminal cost $900 initially (the price was later dropped to $600 in an attempt to stimulate demand); by the time the company made the service available to anyone with a standard PC, videotex’s moment had passed.

Viewtron only attracted 20,000 subscribers, and by 1986, it had been canceled. But not before it cost Knight-Ridder $50 million. The New York Times business section wrote, with admirable understatement, that Viewtron “tried to offer too much to too many people who were not overly interested.”

Nevertheless, BusinessWeek concluded at the time, “Some of the nation’s largest media, technology and financial services companies … remain convinced that some day, everyday life will center on computer screens in the home.” Can you imagine?

Sometimes you can be so far ahead of the curve that you fall right off the edge.

DMV projects — California and Washington

Two Western states spent the 1990s attempting to computerize their departments of motor vehicles, only to abandon the projects after spending millions of dollars. First was California, which in 1987 embarked on a five-year, $27 million plan to develop a system for keeping track of the state’s 31 million drivers’ licenses and 38 million vehicle registrations. But the state solicited a bid from just one company and awarded the contract to Tandem Computers. With Tandem supplying the software, the state was locked into buying Tandem hardware as well, and in 1990, it purchased six computers at a cost of $11.9 million.

That same year, however, tests showed that the new system was slower than the one it was designed to replace. The state forged ahead, but in 1994, it was finally forced to abandon what the San Francisco Chronicle described as “an unworkable system that could not be fixed without the expenditure of millions more.” In that May 1994 article, the Chronicle described it as a “failed $44 million computer project.” In an August article, it was described as a $49 million project, suggesting that the project continued to cost money even after it was shut down. A state audit later concluded that the DMV had “violated numerous contracting laws and regulations.”

Regulations are there for a reason, especially ones that keep you from doing things like placing your future in the hands of one supplier.

Meanwhile, the state of Washington was going through its own nightmare with its License Application Mitigation Project (LAMP). Begun in 1990, LAMP was supposed to cost $16 million over five years and automate the state’s vehicle registration and license renewal processes. By 1992, the projected cost had grown to $41.8 million; a year later, $51 million; by 1997, $67.5 million. Finally, it became apparent that not only was the cost of installing the system out of control, but it would also cost six times as much to run every year as the system it was replacing. Result: plug pulled, with $40 million spent for nothing.

When a project is obviously doomed to failure, get out sooner rather than later.

FoxMeyer ERP program

In 1993, FoxMeyer Drugs was the fourth largest distributor of pharmaceuticals in the U.S., worth $5 billion. In an attempt to increase efficiency, FoxMeyer purchased an SAP system and a warehouse automation system and hired Andersen Consulting to integrate and implement the two in what was supposed to be a $35 million project. By 1996, the company was bankrupt; it was eventually sold to a competitor for a mere $80 million.

The reasons for the failure are familiar. First, FoxMeyer set up an unrealistically aggressive time line — the entire system was supposed to be implemented in 18 months. Second, the warehouse employees whose jobs were affected — more accurately, threatened — by the automated system were not supportive of the project, to say the least. After three existing warehouses were closed, the first warehouse to be automated was plagued by sabotage, with inventory damaged by workers and orders going unfilled.

Finally, the new system turned out to be less capable than the one it replaced: By 1994, the SAP system was processing only 10,000 orders a night, compared with 420,000 orders under the old mainframe. FoxMeyer also alleged that both Andersen and SAP used the automation project as a training tool for junior employees, rather than assigning their best workers to it.

In 1998, two years after filing for bankruptcy , FoxMeyer sued Andersen and SAP for $500 million each, claiming it had paid twice the estimate to get the system in a quarter of the intended sites. The suits were settled and/or dismissed in 2004.

No one plans to fail, but even so, make sure your operation can survive the failure of a project.

Apple’s Copland operating system

It’s easy to forget these days just how desperate Apple Computer was during the 1990s. When Microsoft Windows 95 came out, it arrived with multitasking and dynamic memory allocation, neither of which was available in the existing Mac System 7. Copland was Apple’s attempt to develop a new operating system in-house; actually begun in 1994, the new OS was intended to be released as System 8 in 1996.

Copland’s development could be the poster child for feature creep. As the new OS came to dominate resource allocation within Apple, project managers began protecting their fiefdoms by pushing for their products to be incorporated into System 8. Apple did manage to get one developers’ release out in late 1996, but it was wildly unstable and did little to increase anyone’s confidence in the company.

Before another developer release could come out, Apple made the decision to cancel Copland and look outside for its new operating system; the outcome, of course, was the purchase of NeXT, which supplied the technology that became OS X.

Copland did not die in vain. Some of the technology seen in demos eventually turned up in OS X. And even before that, some Copland features wound up in System 8 and 9, including a multithreaded Finder that provided something like true preemptive multitasking.

Project creep is a killer. Keep your project’s goals focused.

Sainsbury’s warehouse automation

Sainsbury’s, the British supermarket giant, was determined to install an automated fulfillment system in its Waltham Point distribution center in Essex. Waltham Point was the distribution center for much of London and southeast England, and the barcode-based fulfillment system would increase efficiency and streamline operations. If it worked, that is.

Installed in 2003, the system promptly ran into what were then described as “horrendous” barcode-reading errors. Regardless, in 2005 the company claimed the system was operating as intended. Two years later, the entire project was scrapped, and Sainsbury’s wrote off £150 million in IT costs. (That’s $265,335,000 calculated by today’s exchange rate, enough to buy a lot of groceries.)

A square peg in a round hole won’t fit any better as time goes on. Put another way — problems that go unaddressed at rollout will only get worse, not better, over time.

Canada’s gun registration system

In June 1997, Electronic Data Systems and U.K.-based SHL Systemhouse started work on a Canadian national firearm registration system. The original plan was for a modest IT project that would cost taxpayers only $2 million — $119 million for implementation, offset by $117 million in licensing fees.

But then politics got in the way. Pressure from the gun lobby and other interest groups resulted in more than 1,000 change orders in just the first two years. The changes involved having to interface with the computer systems of more than 50 agencies, and since that integration wasn’t part of the original contract, the government had to pay for all the extra work. By 2001, the costs had ballooned to $688 million, including $300 million for support.

But that wasn’t the worst part. By 2001, the annual maintenance costs alone were running $75 million a year. A 2002 audit estimated that the program would wind up costing more than $1 billion by 2004 while generating revenue of only $140 million, giving rise to its nickname: “the billion-dollar boondoggle.”

The registry is still in operation and still a political football. Both the Canadian Police Association and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police have spoken in favor of it, while opponents argue that the money would be better spent otherwise.

Define your project scope and freeze specifications before the requests for changes get out of hand.

Three current projects in danger

At least Canada managed to get its project up and running. Our final three projects, courtesy of the U.S. government, are still in development — they have failed in many ways already, but can still fail more. Will anyone learn anything from them? After reading these other stories, we know how we’d bet.

FBI Virtual Case File

In 2000, the FBI finally decided to get serious about automating its case management and forms processing, and in September of that year, Congress approved $379.8 million for the Information Technology Upgrade Project. What started as an attempt to upgrade the existing Automated Case Support system became, in 2001, a project to develop an entirely new system, the Virtual Case File (VCS), with a contract awarded to Science Applications International Corp.

That sounds reasonable until you read about the development time allotted (a mere 22 months), the rollout plans (a “flash cutover,” in which the new system would come online and the old one would go offline over a single weekend), and the system requirements (an 800-page document specifying details down to the layout of each page).

By late 2002, the FBI needed another $123.2 million for the project. And change requests started to take a toll: According to SAIC, those totaled about 400 by the end of 2003. In April 2005, SAIC delivered 700,000 lines of code that the FBI considered so bug-ridden and useless that the agency decided to scrap the entire VCS project. A later audit blamed factors such as poorly defined design requirements, an overly ambitious schedule and the lack of an overall plan for purchases and deployment.

The FBI did use some of what it learned from the VCF disaster in its current Sentinel project. Sentinel, now scheduled for completion in 2012, should do what VCF was supposed to do using off-the-shelf, Web-based software.

Homeland Security’s virtual fence

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is bolstering the U.S. Border Patrol with a network of radar, satellites, sensors and communication links — what’s commonly referred to as a “virtual fence.” In September 2006, a contract for this Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet, not to be confused with Skynet) was awarded to Boeing, which was given $20 million to construct a 28-mile pilot section along the Arizona-Mexico border.

But early this year, Congress learned that the pilot project was being delayed because users had been excluded from the process and the complexity of the project had been underestimated. (Sound familiar?) In February 2008, the Government Accountability Office reported that the radar meant to detect aliens coming across the border could be set off by rain and other weather, and the cameras mean to zoom in on subjects sent back images of uselessly low resolution for objects beyond 3.1 miles. Also, the pilot’s communications system interfered with local residents’ WiFi networks — not good PR.

In April, DHS announced that the surveillance towers of the pilot fence did not meet the Border Patrol’s goals and were being replaced — a story picked up by the Associated Press and widely reported in the mainstream media. But the story behind the story is less clear. The DHS and Boeing maintain the original towers were only temporary installations for demonstration purposes. Even so, the project is already experiencing delays and cost overruns, and in April, SBInet program manager Kirk Evans resigned , citing lack of a system design as just one specific concern. Not an auspicious beginning.

Census Bureau’s handheld units

Back in 2006, the U.S. Census Bureau made a plan to use 500,000 handheld devices — purchased from Harris Corp. under a $600 million contract — to help automate the 2010 census. Now, though, the cost has more than doubled, and their use is going to be curtailed in 2010 — but the Census Bureau is moving ahead with the project anyway.

During a rehearsal for the census conducted in the fall of 2007, according to the GAO, field staff found that the handheld devices froze or failed to retrieve mapping coordinates (see Hard questions needed to save projects for details). Furthermore, multiple devices had the same identification number, which meant they would overwrite one another’s data.

After the rehearsal, a representative of Mitre Corp. , which advises the bureau on IT matters, brought notes to a meeting with the bureau’s representative that read, “It is not clear that the system will meet Census’ operational needs and quality goals. The final cost is unpredictable. Immediate, significant changes are required to rescue the program. However, the risks are so large considering the available time that we recommend immediate development of contingency plans to revert to paper operations.”

There you have it, a true list of IT Ig Nobels: handheld computers that don’t work as well as pencil and paper, new systems that are slower and less capable than the old ones they’re meant to replace. Perhaps the overarching lesson is one that project managers should have learned at their mothers’ knees: Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

San Francisco-based Widman is a frequent contributor to Computerworld .

Related content

Windows 11 insider previews: what’s in the latest build, tech layoffs in 2024: a timeline, microsoft unbundles teams and office globally to avoid antitrust fight, when the going gets tough, apple’s siri goes pro, from our editors straight to your inbox.

Jake Widman is a freelance writer in San Francisco and a regular contributor to Computerworld , PCWorld , and TechHive .

More from this author

10 smartsheet tips and tricks, ar and vr bring a new twist to collaboration, how it can prepare for vr, ar and mr in the enterprise, how to cure ‘corporate amnesia’ with knowledge management software, most popular authors.

• Howard Wen Contributing Writer

Show me more

Biggest problems and best practices for generative ai rollouts.

Kill meetings (before meetings kill your company)

McDonald's serves up a master class in how not to explain a system outage

Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in prison

How to combat social media addiction

How social media companies are addicting adolescents

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Reading Lists
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

HBR Case Study: A Rush to Failure?

A complex project for the space station must come in on time and on budget—but the push for speed might be its undoing.

There is absolutely no reason why the contractors shouldn’t be able to give us rapid product development and flawless products—speed and quality both,” David MacDonagle said as he tried to light a cigarette. The warm wind, portending rain, kept blowing out his matches. Finally he gave up and slipped the cigarette back in his pocket.

• TC Tom Cross is a senior director in executive education at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, where he develops executive learning programs for Department of Defense leaders. Previously he was a senior executive at such firms as KFC and Office Depot.

Partner Center

• Faculty and Staff
• Research Assistants
• Job Openings
• Research Areas
• Publications
• The Evidence Base Blog
• Behavioral Economics Studio
• Behavioral and Health Genomics Center
• Brain Health Observatory @USC
• Center for Applied Research in Education
• Center for Health and Labor Economics (HALE)
• Center for Self-Report Science
• Center for the Study of Health Inequality
• CESR International Development
• Institute for Food System Equity
• The Interplay of Genes and Environment across Multiple Studies (IGEMS) consortium
• LA Barometer
• Program for Children and Families
• Program on Global Aging, Health, and Policy
• USC mHealth Collaboratory
• Understanding America Study
• UAS Datapages
• Global Aging Data Repository
• Health and Retirement Study
• Yucatan Aging Data
• CESR Education Study
• Brown Bag Series
• Seminar Series
• CESR's Ten Year Anniversary
• Events Archive
• CIPHER 2024
• Expert Commentary

Case Study: Project Failure Often Linked to Design Problems

Development portfolio management group (dpmg).

• Our Mission & Challenge
• What's At Stake?
• Our Origins
• Our Services
• Our Expertise
• Quality Assurance
• Service Costs

A comparison of two sets of ratings for the same cohort of projects showed that 74% of projects with satisfactory designs also had satisfactory outcomes years later.

The quality of a project's design is a strong indicator of its likelihood of success.

The World Bank's Quality Assurance Group (QAG), DPMG's predecessor, compared two sets of ratings for the same cohort of projects. One set was based on evaluations of the design quality of each project. The other ratings measured whether these projects had achieved their development objectives by the time they closed.

Of the 385 projects evaluated, 74% of projects with satisfactory designs also had satisfactory outcomes years later. By contrast, projects rated less than satisfactory on the basis of their designs were twice as likely as others to fail.

The study also showed that design flaws could be corrected if projects were evaluated early during their implementation. More than half of the projects found to have poor designs were turned around during supervision, and those that were evaluated early performed better than those evaluated later.

Common Design Problems

Four design problems were highly correlated with risk of failure.

Overly complex project designs Some project objectives are too complex and ambitious for the institution or government to manage. Donors’ (and governments’) enthusiasm tends to expand the scope of a project beyond the capabilities of weaker governments. This complexity takes many forms:

• Multiple sub-sectors, such as the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of education
• Multiple beneficiaries, such as disabled children, street children, migrant children, girls in ethnic minority areas, and illiterate adults
• Multiple reform objectives, such as access, quality, equity, and efficiency.

Complex projects place heavy demands on implementing entities that often have limited capacities. The mismatch between complexity and capacity occurs most frequently in low-income and fragile states.

Poorly formulated causal links between inputs, outputs, and outcomes Poorly formulated objectives set up targets that are impossible to achieve. For example, the goal of one project was to produce more trained engineers. However, the project focused on construction of new training facilities that would not have produced any graduates by the end of the project.

Poorly selected indicators of success Poorly selected indicators of success leave all parties to the project flying blind. For example, one project gave four indicators of its objectives. Three of these were outputs (such as the number of vaccination doses procured), not outcomes (such as the number of children vaccinated). In the same project, one outcome measure was inappropriate: it applied to the entire country, not to the sub-regions addressed by the project.

Premature approval Sometimes projects are approved before they are ready. Examples include infrastructure projects that begin before the bidding documents for the first year of work have been prepared or projects that begin before baseline data for indicators of intended outcomes have been collected.

When projects enter the portfolio too soon, project teams may spend the first year or longer addressing issues that should have been handled before the project started. In these cases, the project is not likely to meet its objectives by the time resources have been spent.

Sunday, January 20, 2019

• Labels: Case Studies , Project Failure

Case Study 1: The £10 Billion IT Disaster at the NHS

If you want to make sure your business critical project is off to a great start instead of on its way on my list with project failures? Then a New Project Audit is what you are looking for. If you want to know where you are standing with that large, multi-year, strategic project? Or you think one of your key projects is in trouble? Then a Project Review is what you are looking for. If you just want to read more project failure case studies? Then have a look at the overview of all case studies I have written here .

Timeline of Events

What went wrong, how nhs could have done things differently, closing thoughts.

Failure of Francis Scott Key Bridge provides future engineers a chance to learn how to better protect the public

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Delaware

Disclosure statement

Michael J. Chajes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Delaware provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

View all partners

The cargo ship collision that destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on March 26, 2024, is raising questions about just how much engineers can do to prevent such catastrophes from occurring in the future. Here, Michael J. Chajes , a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Delaware, discusses how bridge design codes have changed over the years and the challenges of building new structures, and retrofitting existing ones, so they can survive extreme events

How hard is it to design a bridge to withstand the force that took down the Francis Scott Key Bridge?

Once engineers understand the forces that a structure will be subjected to, they can design a structure to withstand them. That said, we know that each force has a range of magnitudes that can occur. For example, not all trucks on the roadways weigh the same amount, not all earthquakes are of the same magnitude, and not all ships have the same weight. We incorporate this variability in forces into the design.

Even if built to a given set of plans, the final strength of the structure can vary. The materials used have variations in strength. For example, concrete delivered on two successive days will have a sightly different final strength. This variability in the strength of the final structure is also taken into account in the design process to ensure the bridge or building is safe. There’s no way we could build two bridges from the same set of plans and they end up with the exact same strength.

Based on the weight and speed of the ship that hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge, today’s U.S. bridge design code would call for the bridge to be designed to resist a lateral force of 11,500 tons. This means the bridge has the ability to withstand a lateral hit of that magnitude. That is equivalent to the weight of about 50 loaded Boeing 777s or the weight of the Eiffel Tower. While this is a very large lateral force, structures can be designed to resist such forces. Tall buildings are routinely designed to resist lateral loads of this magnitude that result from wind or earthquakes. However, it is a matter of how much one wants to spend on the structure, and many design goals and constraints need to be balanced against each other.

What do engineers do to ensure safety in extreme events?

Our knowledge of how extreme events affect structures is constantly evolving. One area where this is very apparent is earthquake engineering . After each earthquake, structural engineers learn what has worked and what has not worked, and then the building and bridge design codes evolve. Infrastructure owners also try to retrofit existing structures that were designed to earlier codes.

Ship collisions and their impact on bridges are a similar area of evolving understanding and improved design codes. There have been over 35 major bridge collapses globally that were caused by ship collisions from 1960 to 2015 . Engineers evaluate the failures, and they update the engineering codes so that they better account for the effects of ship collisions.

How has bridge design evolved since the Baltimore bridge was built?

The Francis Scott Key Bridge was designed in the early 1970s. Construction started in 1972, and it opened to traffic in 1977. This preceded the 1980 collapse of the Sunshine Skyway in Florida, which was caused by a ship collision, similar to what happened in Baltimore. That bridge collapse led to the initiation of research projects that culminated in the development of a U.S. guide specification in 1991 that was updated in 2009.

Based on that guide specification, bridge design codes were changed to include forces due to ship collisions. The design of the Francis Scott Key Bridge would not have been required to consider the effect of ship collisions. The current U.S. bridge design code says that:

“where vessel collision is anticipated, structures should be:

• Designed to resist vessel collision forces and/or

• Adequately protected by fenders, dolphins, berms, islands, or other sacrifice-able devices.”

Other changes since the 1970s are that cargo ships have increased in size and weight . The ship that brought down the Sunshine Skyway in 1980 weighed 35,000 tons, while the ship that collided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge weighed 95,000 tons.

With the increasing weight of cargo ships, the most cost-effective design strategy to prevent collapse of bridges due to vessel collision may well be to protect the bridge piers from the impact. This is done by building a bridge collision protective system, which is often a concrete or rock structure that surrounds the pier and stops the ship from getting to the pier, as is done to protect many of our national monuments.

A pier protection system was installed when the Sunshine Skyway bridge was rebuilt, and it has been used on numerous other bridges . The same approach is currently being applied by the Delaware River and Bay Authority at a cost of US$93 million to protect the piers of the Delaware Memorial Bridge .

But what about existing bridges like the Francis Scott Key Bridge? Bridge owners have a tremendous challenge finding the financial resources needed to retrofit their bridges to satisfy the latest design codes and to account for the increased impact loads expected due to the heavier and heavier ships. Both things happened here. That is, design codes changed and improved, and loads got much larger. Engineers and infrastructure owners try their best to prioritize where their limited funds can be used to increase structural safety and minimize the chance of structural failure.

What can universities do?

The No. 1 job of structural engineers is to protect the public and minimize the risk of structural failures that pose a threat to human life. To do that, engineers must be able to calculate the forces that our structures may be subjected to. This includes cases where a large ship accidentally collides with a bridge, or a large earthquake or hurricane strikes.

In these extreme cases, the structure will almost assuredly sustain damage, but, if at all possible, it should be resilient enough to not collapse. The design codes are continually updated to account for new knowledge, new materials and new design techniques. The reliability of our structures is improving all the time.

Retrofitting structures built to prior codes is an ongoing process, and one that this disaster moves to the forefront. The U.S. has a lot of infrastructure that was designed to old codes, and we have larger trucks crossing our bridges, and larger ships passing beneath them.

Engineers can never reduce the probability of failure to zero, but they can reduce it to the point where failures happen very infrequently and only in cases where numerous unforeseen circumstances combine to make a structure vulnerable to collapse.

• Catastrophe
• Civil engineering
• Bridge construction
• Structural engineering
• Cargo ships
• naval disasters
• Baltimore bridge collapse

Lecturer (Hindi-Urdu)

Initiative Tech Lead, Digital Products COE

Director, Defence and Security

Opportunities with the new CIEHF

School of Social Sciences – Public Policy and International Relations opportunities

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Project Failure Case Studies and Suggestion

2014, International Journal of Computer Applications

Related Papers

Bigmo Asiedu

milad kiaei

ibimapublishing.com

Iman Attarzadeh

Karthik D Netalkar

Construction Economics and Building

Peter Livesey

A Delphi study using project managers who had managed projects in excess of $500 million was used to confirm the significance and frequency of problems resulting from the nature of projects. Using the results obtained from the Delphi study a ranking of the problems experienced in these projects was obtained by calculating a Relative Importance Index. Additionally, the Delphi panel members were asked their views concerning the need for traditional project management skills (hard skills) and team management skills (soft skills) as project size increased from below $50 million to over $500 million. A substantial increase in the need for both skills was indicated with the increase in the need for soft skills being the most significant.

Aarti Maherchandani

karrar raoof

Darrel Hubbard

Project management, when viewed as a management discipline from the perspectives of various executive levels, functions, and types found within different enterprises, can be described as many things by those executives. The field of Project Management is complex, multifaceted, and evolving. Included within this management discipline is a wide-range of related management disciplines and knowledge-area sub-disciplines, all of which affect diverse stakeholders. However, individually, or employed in small sets, these specific views of project management neither address nor solve the larger issues associated with successfully implementing and employing project management within the overall enterprise to create benefits and value and to address stakeholder needs. In addition, a significant portion of the project management literature and defined processes and methodologies for the many management disciplines and sub-disciplines does not address the broader business, organizational, sociol...

Karen Higgins

Course Background Today's business environment moves rapidly and often unpredictably. At any given time, funding and political support may wax or wane. Technology changes in areas such as computers, new materials, or breakthrough products are rapid and profound. The competitive landscape shifts daily. Goals evolve and often are interpreted differently, depending on the perspective of the stakeholder. Uncertainties create risk that must be managed. Industries, organizations and people are more interdependent than ever, relying on each other in areas such as specialized technical expertise and facilities. Businesses must collaborate to produce a product or service. Leaders can no longer rely on power, roles or processes alone to influence outcomes when they work interdependently with other organizations. To be successful in this complex and dynamic environment, project managers and leaders must demonstrate abilities beyond experience, technical and process insight, communication ...

RELATED PAPERS

Learning & Memory

Revista de Direito Brasileira

EDUARDO DIAS

Materials Science and Engineering: B

The Journal of the Petrological Society of Korea

Sung-Hyo Yun

LWT - Food Science and Technology

Rosana Moreira

Angewandte Chemie

Lawrence Que

Revista Brasileira de Geomorfologia

Sergio Donizete Faria

Theresia Yunia

Jurnal Ilmiah Manajemen Muhammadiyah Aceh

taufiq qurohman

agus walansendow

European Journal of Gastroenterology & Hepatology

Heitor Souza

Chemistry - A European Journal

Simarpreet Singh

Clinical and Experimental Dermatology

aurora parodi

Scientiae Studia

Silvio Seno Chibeni

Hak Soo Choi

Abdul Nazar

Sergio Rafael Amaya Bermudez

Journal of the Society of Powder Technology, Japan

Mamoru Senna

Springer eBooks

Mervin Smucker

karim zulkarnain

Canadian Journal of Anesthesia/Journal canadien d'anesthésie

Steven Shulman

Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa …

Dr. Fadzilah Abd Rahman

The Prostate

Dusanka Savic-Pavicevic

latifa ouadif

See More Documents Like This

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Baltimore bridge collapse: What happened and what is the death toll?

What is the death toll, when did the baltimore bridge collapse, why did the bridge collapse, who will pay for the damage and how much will the bridge cost.

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE TO REBUILD THE BRIDGE?

What ship hit the baltimore bridge, what do we know about the bridge that collapsed.

HOW WILL THE BRIDGE COLLAPSE IMPACT THE BALTIMORE PORT?

Get weekly news and analysis on the U.S. elections and how it matters to the world with the newsletter On the Campaign Trail. Sign up here.

Writing by Lisa Shumaker; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Bill Berkrot

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. , opens new tab

Thomson Reuters

Lisa's journalism career spans two decades, and she currently serves as the Americas Day Editor for the Global News Desk. She played a pivotal role in tracking the COVID pandemic and leading initiatives in speed, headline writing and multimedia. She has worked closely with the finance and company news teams on major stories, such as the departures of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and significant developments at Apple, Alphabet, Facebook and Tesla. Her dedication and hard work have been recognized with the 2010 Desk Editor of the Year award and a Journalist of the Year nomination in 2020. Lisa is passionate about visual and long-form storytelling. She holds a degree in both psychology and journalism from Penn State University.

Indonesia's Prabowo pledges cooperation with Japan after promising China closer ties

Indonesia's president-elect Prabowo Subianto on Wednesday told Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida he wanted deeper security and economic cooperation just two days after telling Chinese President Xi Jinping he wished for close ties.

The White House held a scaled-down iftar dinner on Tuesday to celebrate Islam's holy month of Ramadan, after some invitees turned the president down over frustrations in the Muslim community over his policy toward the Israel-Gaza war.

Japan issued an evacuation advisory for the coastal areas of the southern prefecture of Okinawa after a powerful earthquake triggered a tsunami warning.

• Leadership Crisis
• Editor's Pick

Broad, Boston Children’s Provide Research Integrity Tools Following Longwood Data Manipulation Allegations

‘Message of Hope’: 11 Harvard Affiliates Visit Israel in Solidarity Trip

Campaign to Fire Graham & Parks Principal Causes Rift Among Parents

Class of 2028 Results Will Offer the First Clues About Harvard’s Post-Affirmative Action Admissions

Harvard College Women’s Center Kicks Off 2024 Women’s Week With ‘Rooted’ Theme

Harvard Law School Digitization Project Publishes Nearly 7 Million Court Cases Online

The Caselaw Access Project published nearly seven million cases from the Harvard Law School’s collections online on March 8, concluding a nine-year process to digitize the HLS Library’s archive of court cases.

The Caselaw Access Project, also known as CAP, aimed “to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online in a consistent format, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law School Library,” according to the project’s website.

The recent release of cases has culminated in “360 years of United States caselaw” accessible to the public, according to the project’s website. This includes all “official, book-published state and federal United States caselaw through 2020,” with the first case dating back to 1658.

Jack Cushman, the project’s director, said that the impetus behind the effort was a desire to make caselaw more accessible to the public. In the past, few people beyond lawyers had access to expensive caselaw databases and could view important legal decisions.

This project, according to Cushman, sought to level the playing field.

Cushman said he believed it was important “for everyone to have access to the law of the land.”

CAP launched in 2015 through a partnership with Ravel Law, a legal research and analytics startup company. Per the terms of the partnership, CAP received financial support in exchange for Ravel obtaining eight years of exclusivity with the caselaw documents, according to Harvard Law Today, a school-run publication.

This project falls under the initiatives of the Law School’s Library Innovation Lab, “a forward-looking group of thinkers and doers working at the intersection of libraries, technology, and law,” according to the organization's website. The LIL facilitated the delicate process of digitizing case files for the project.

As part of the process, 40,000 books containing case files were retrieved from Harvard Law School’s collection in the HLS Library and a repository in Southborough, Mass. The CAP team then used a variety of tools to de-bind the books, effectively scan case files at a rate of 500,000 pages per week, and wrap the books in plastic to be sent to a limestone mine in Kentucky for preservation.

The scanned files were then translated into machine-readable documents and uploaded to the Ravel website. Ravel’s website made sifting through documents easier with their “data science, machine learning, and visualization” systems, according to Harvard Law Today.

Cushman said it was essential to not rush the process, as CAP was dealing with delicate documents that were both culturally and historically important.

“I think one lesson is just, it’s okay if it takes a long time,” he said. “For cultural preservation and cultural heritage — we’re in this for the long run.”

Now that the case files have been digitized, CAP aims to further improve search functionality to make the platform “practically usable,” furthering their mission to increase caselaw accessibility for all. With this forward-looking approach to law accessibility, CAP’s next goal is to strengthen its institutional collaborations with AI model makers interested in high quality datasets.

Cushman said that the digital archive could be useful for “Harvard students who are looking for projects or ways to make their mark with civic technology and big datasets.”

“We’ve only scratched the surface of what you can do with it,” Cushman added.

Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter.

An analytical solution to predict slip-buckling failure of bedding rock slopes under the influence of top loading and earthquakes: Case studies of Hejia landslide and Tangjiashan landslide

• Technical Note
• Published: 02 April 2024

Cite this article

• Leilei Jin 1 ,
• Guanghong Ju 2 ,
• Zhengfeng Chen 3 ,
• Qianfeng Xiao 1 ,
• Wenxi Fu 1 ,
• Fei Ye   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9315-9621 1 &
• Yufeng Wei 1  

Slip-buckling failure is a common occurrence in bedding rock slopes, and it can be triggered by long-term gravitational stress, earthquakes, top loading and intense rainfall. In this paper, an analytical solution is proposed to address the slip-buckling failure of bedding rock slopes under the influences of top loading and earthquakes based on mechanical analysis and energy equilibrium theory. The rock layers of bedding slopes are treated as inclined plate beams with hinge support at the slope top and fixed support at the slope toe. The equation for the deflection curve of each rock column of the bedding rock slope under earthquake and top loading can be derived by analysing the forces acting on each rock layer. According to the energy equilibrium theory, the deformation energy of the rock column equals the work done by external forces, from which the critical length of a slope rock layer for slip-buckling failure can be determined. The location of the toe of the rupture surface, where slip-buckling failure occurs, corresponds to the point of maximum deflection on the deflection curve of the rock layer. Clearly, the location of the toe of the rupture surface is where the first derivative of the deflection curve equation equals zero. This approach has been applied to the Hejia landslide and Tangjiashan earthquake-triggered landslide, and the calculation results are in good agreement with the field investigation results.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Data Availability

Data is available on request from the authors.

Barla G, Paronuzzi P (2013) The 1963 Vajont Landslide: 50th Anniversary. Rock Mech Rock Eng 46(6):1267–1270. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00603-013-0483-7

Article   Google Scholar  

Cavers DS (1981) Simple methods to analyze buckling of rock slopes. Rock Mech 14(2):87–104. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01239857

Che AL, Yang HK, Wang B, Ge XR (2016) Wave propagations through jointed rock masses and their effects on the stability of slopes. Eng Geol 201:45–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enggeo.2015.12.018

Chigira M, Wu XY, Inokuchi T, Wang GH (2010) Landslides induced by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, Sichuan, China. Geomorphology 118(3–4):225–238. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2010.01.003

Dong JY, Wang C, Huang ZQ, Yang JH, Xue L (2022) Shaking table model test to determine dynamic response characteristics and failure modes of steep bedding rock slope. Rock Mech Rock Eng 55(6):3645–3658. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00603-022-02822-x

Fan G, Zhang JJ, Wu JB, Yan KM (2016) Dynamic response and dynamic failure mode of a weak intercalated rock slope using a shaking table. Rock Mech Rock Eng 49(8):3243–3256. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00603-016-0971-7

Feng XX, Jiang QH, Zhang HC, Zhang XB (2020) Study on the dynamic response of dip bedded rock slope using discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA) and shaking table tests. Int J Numer Anal Methods Geomech 15(3):411–427. https://doi.org/10.1002/nag.3162

Garzon SER (2017) Analytical solution for assessing continuum buckling in sedimentary rock slopes based on the tangent-modulus theory. In J Numer Anal Methods Geomech 90:53–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijrmms.2016.10.002

Hou ZJ, Yang BQ, Zhang L, Chen Y, Yang GX (2020) Comprehensive method to test the stability of high bedding rock slop subjected to atomized rain. Appl Sci-Basel 10(5):1577. https://doi.org/10.3390/app10051577

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Li YY, Feng XY, Yao AJ, Zhan ZH, Li K, Wang QS, Song SY (2022) Progressive evolution and failure behavior of a Holocene river-damming landslide in the SE Tibetan Plateau, China. Landslides 19(5):1069–1086. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-021-01835-x

Lin F, Wu LZ, Huang RQ, Zhang H (2017) Formation and characteristics of the Xiaoba landslide in Fuquan, Guizhou, China. Landslides 15(4):669–681. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-017-0897-5

Liu HY, Wang GH, Huang F (2016) Methods to analyze flexural buckling of the consequent slabbed rock slope under top loading. Math Probl Eng 2016:3402547. https://doi.org/10.1155/2016/3402547

Qi SW, Lan HX, Dong JY (2015) An analytical solution to slip buckling slope failure triggered by earthquake. Eng Geol 194(SI):4–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enggeo.2014.06.004

Qin S, Jiao JJ, Wang S (2001) A cusp catastrophe model of instability of slip-buckling slope. Rock Mech Rock Eng 34(2):119–134. https://doi.org/10.1007/s006030170018

Salmi EF, Hosseinzadeh S (2014) Slope stability assessment using both empirical and numerical methods: a case study. Bull Eng Geol Environ 74(1):13–25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10064-013-0565-5

Sun GZ (1988) Rock Mass Structure Mechanics. Science Press, Beijing, pp 355–362. (in Chinese)

Tsou CY, Feng ZY, Chigira M (2011) Catastrophic landslide induced by Typhoon Morakot, Shiaolin, Taiwan. Geomorphology 127(3–4):166–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2010.12.013

Wang WN, Chigira M, Furuya T (2003) Geological and geomorphological precursors of the Chiu-fen-erh-shan landslide triggered by the Chi-chi earthquake in central Taiwan. Eng Geol 69(1–2):1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0013-7952(02)00244-2

Weng MC, Chen TC, Tsai SJ (2017) Modeling scale effects on consequent slope deformation by centrifuge model tests and the discrete element method. Landslides 14(3):981–993. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-016-0774-7

Yang CM, Kang KH, Yang SH (2020a) Large paleo-rockslide induced by buckling failure at Jiasian in Southern Taiwan. Landslides 17(6):1319–1335. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-020-01360-3

Yang CW, Zhang L, Liu Y, Tian DH, Guo XY, Liu Y (2020b) Shaking table test on dynamic response of bedding rock slopes with weak structural plane under earthquake. Front Physics 8:556714. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2020.556714

Yin YP, Huang BL, Chen XT (2015) Numerical analysis on wave generated by the Qianjiangping landslide in Three Gorges Reservoir, China. Landslides 12(2):355–364. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-015-0564-7

Zhang Q, Hu J, Du YL, Gao YJ, Li Z (2021) A laboratory and field-monitoring experiment on the ability of anti-slide piles to prevent buckling failures in bedding slopes. Environ Earth Sci 80(2):44. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-020-09288-6

Zhang YJ, Nian TK, Guo XS, Chen GQ, Zheng L (2019) Modelling the flexural buckling failure of stratified rock slopes based on the multilayer beam model. J Mt Sci 16(5):1170–1183. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-018-5007-1

Zhao SY, Chigira M, Wu XY (2018) Buckling deformations at the 2017 Xinmo landslide site and nearby slopes, Maoxian, Sichuan, China. Eng Geol 246:187–197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enggeo.2018.09.033

Zou ZX, Mu R, Luo YF, Guo B, Tan L, Su AJ, Tang CY (2022) Progressive evaluation of buckling landslide stability considering strain softening behavior of the slip zone. Int J Numer Anal Methods Geomech 46(14):2680–2697. https://doi.org/10.1002/nag.3422

Download references

The authors wish to thank National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2022YFC308100) and the National Nature Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42377145 and 42072303) for financial support.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

State Key Laboratory of Hydraulic and Mountain River Engineering, Dept. of Geotechnical Engineering, Sichuan University, No. 24 South Section 1, Yihuan Road, Chengdu, P.R. China, 610065

Leilei Jin, Qianfeng Xiao, Wenxi Fu, Fei Ye & Yufeng Wei

Power China Northwest Engineering Co., Ltd., No. 24, Zhangba East Road, Xi’an, P.R. China, 710065

Guanghong Ju

China Southwest Geotechnical Investigation and Design Institute Co., Ltd., No. 33 Hangtian Road, Chengdu, P.R. China, 610052

Zhengfeng Chen

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fei Ye .

Ethics declarations

Competing interest.

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Jin, L., Ju, G., Chen, Z. et al. An analytical solution to predict slip-buckling failure of bedding rock slopes under the influence of top loading and earthquakes: Case studies of Hejia landslide and Tangjiashan landslide. Landslides (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-024-02232-w

Download citation

Received : 08 November 2023

Accepted : 16 February 2024

Published : 02 April 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-024-02232-w

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Bedding rock slope
• Slip-buckling failure
• Analytical solution
• Energy equilibrium theory
• Hejia landslide
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research