By Michael F. Walker

When people ask me why projects fail, they expect me to talk about the usual suspects—scope creep, poor stakeholder engagement, bad requirements, and my personal favorite: “We didn’t account for that.” Sure, all of those play a role. But in my two decades of project leadership, one pattern has stood out more than any other.

Most projects don’t fail at the end. They fail before they even begin.

They fail in the assumptions.
They fail in the unasked questions.
They fail in the rush to “just get started.”

Because while it’s tempting to get into execution mode, skipping the hard conversations upfront is like trying to hang drywall before pouring the foundation. Everything looks fine—for a while—until it isn’t.

A Quick Story About a Team That “Started Strong”

Let me tell you about a team I worked with briefly—names changed, of course, but let’s call them David, Lindsey, and Binsy. Bright team. High energy. Passionate about the work. The project? A major internal platform rollout for a financial services firm. Multi-million dollar budget. Six-month timeline. High visibility.

I met them three weeks in. They were already behind.

“Michael, we’re stuck,” Lindsey told me during our first check-in. “We don’t know if we’re going too fast or too slow, and everyone’s working off different versions of the plan.”

So I asked them to walk me through their kickoff.

“Did you define success together?”
David: “Sort of. We had a slide about KPIs.”

“Is there a single source of truth everyone updates?”
Binsy: “We’ve got a Google Drive folder. I think there’s a Notion doc too.”

“Who owns what, specifically?”
Lindsey: “We’ve been… kinda fluid on that. We’re trying to stay agile.”

You see where this is going.

This was a classic case of assumed alignment. Everyone nodded in the same meetings, but no one left with the same interpretation. That’s not a project kickoff. That’s just choreography.

They had good people. They had good intentions. What they didn’t have was ruthless clarity.

So we took a pause. Two days. No deliverables. Just alignment.

We mapped out:

• What success actually looked like (measurable outcomes, not buzzwords)
• A RACI that removed ambiguity (“Who owns this?” should never be a question)
• A single, shared, living project hub
• A weekly sync to verify alignment, not just report status

Two weeks later, they were still behind—but this time, everyone knew why, and more importantly, they knew how to fix it. They finished one month past their original deadline… but still under budget and with stakeholder satisfaction at an all-time high.

That’s not failure. That’s strategic recovery.

The 3 Quiet Killers of Project Success

When a project stumbles, the issue is rarely about the people. It’s about the invisible gaps at the beginning. Here are the three I see the most:

1. Ambiguity in Objectives
   If you ask five team members what success looks like and get five different answers, your project has already split into five paths. Alignment isn’t a kickoff slide—it’s a team agreement forged through clarity.
2. No Single Source of Truth
   I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen teams work in parallel silos—one person updating a spreadsheet, another in Jira, another with notes in their notebook that never see the light of day. If your truth is fragmented, your decisions will be too.
3. Assumed Alignment
   People smile, nod, and leave the room thinking they’re all on the same page. They’re not. Alignment is not a moment; it’s a process. It’s verified regularly. It’s created through friction and clarity, not consensus.

The Antidote? Pause to Align. Then Accelerate.

I always say: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. The time you “lose” in clarifying your foundations is time you gain tenfold in not backtracking later.

Before you write a single user story or launch into sprint 1, ask yourself:

• Have we defined success in terms of measurable impact?
• Does everyone know where to find the truth—and who owns it?
• Have we created space for disagreement before declaring alignment?

If the answer is no, you’re not ready to start.

And that’s okay.

Because smart projects don’t rush. They launch with precision.

And the teams that embrace that? They’re the ones still smiling at the finish line—long after everyone else is putting out fires.