Most projects fail before they start.
The failure mode is almost never capability. It is setup.
Kyle Dahgon ·
Projects rarely fail because the team was not good enough. They fail because they were never set up correctly: no clear scope, no shared definition of success, no plan for when things go sideways. The fix is cheap and early, a charter and an alignment session, not heroics later.
Walk into a struggling project and you will usually find capable people working hard. That is what makes the failure so frustrating: effort was never the problem. The problem was that nobody agreed, in writing, on what the project actually was.
Scope was assumed, not defined. Success was described differently by every stakeholder. And there was no plan for the moment something went wrong, so when it did, the team improvised instead of executing.
The fix is unglamorous: define the project before the first task is assigned. A signed charter, a stakeholder register, a risk register, and a facilitated alignment session. It costs a fraction of what a failed project costs, and it is the entire premise of the Initiate engagement.
All engagements are flat-fee, no hourly surprises.