Enlightenment Projects: How they can fail

[rex]

Well there's nothing like relating the outer world to one's inner quest. I was thumbing through the the UK Office of Government Commerce's PRINCE2 manual on project management and found some striking parallels with their suggested reasons for project failure and possible pitfalls on our own spiritual projects:

• Insufficient attention to checking that a valid Business Case exists for the project
   
   
  
• Insufficient attention to quality at the outset and during development
   
   
  
• Insufficient definition of the required outcomes, leading to confusion over what the project is expected to achieve
   
   
  
• Inadequate definition and lack of acceptance of project management roles and responsibilities, leading to lack of direction and poor decision making
   
   
  
• Inadequate planning and co-ordination of resources, leading to poor scheduling
   
   
  
• Insufficient measurables and lack of control over progress, so that projects do not reveal their exact status until too late
   
   
  
• Lack of quality control, resulting in the delivery of products that are unacceptable or unusable.
  

Edited March 23, 2009 by rex

[goldisheavy]

I think there is a good deal of wisdom in your post. The only thing that sticks out as questionable is the reference to "measurables". Being on a spiritual quest may be hard to express in terms of measurables. However, if you could measure something, that might be an honest way to check progress. Measurement works well for mundane goals because in the mundane world, "if we cannot measure it, it doesn't exist" is often true. It's especially true in the fields of engineering and science. Less true in arts. But even for a mundane task, it's all too easy to measure the wrong thing and to thus provide a wrong kind of incentive that skews the project away from its intended purpose.

Edited March 24, 2009 by goldisheavy