1. The plugin swap that ate the budget (Lucas Robinson, Crediful)
Lucas Robinson was CMO of Crediful when he shared this story with Ganttic.
On a detailed client project one winter, a teammate suggested swapping the team’s usual slider for a new plugin in the client’s portfolio section. The plugin ran on a framework the team rarely used, but it looked and behaved better. Robinson hesitated because the timeline was tight and the design direction was very specific. He agreed anyway, seeing a chance to test the plugin on a live job.
Once installed, the plugin could not support a feature the project needed, and it struggled with responsive sizing and certain browsers. By the time his teammate reached testing, none of it worked. He tried to patch the new plugin together and never went back to the team’s standard slider.
It was one of the most costly decisions of the project, in man-hours and budget.
Lucas Robinson, CMO, Crediful
Robinson’s diagnosis is specific. Because nobody treated the swap as a planned update, it never went through the usual review with tech leads and other developers, even though the problem “would have been so easy to catch at the outset.” Adding features or polish the client never asked for is known in project management as gold-plating.
Lesson: make scope changes visible with shared Views
The team already had the right safeguard, a review by tech leads before any toolset change reaches a client project, and skipped it. A shared plan makes that harder to do quietly. When the agreed tasks sit where every lead can see them, a rebuild that adds days of work has to land somewhere on the timeline, and the people who should have vetted it can spot it there.
In Ganttic, a View is a filtered slice of your wider plan, and you can create as many as you need, for example one per client project or development team. New Views start out private. Owners and Admins can share a View with selected users or make it public, then lock it so other users cannot change its filters. On bigger teams, the same approach keeps each group focused on its own work, as this guide to managing large teams with Views explains.
2. A standoff that turned 9 months into nearly 2 years (Alan Zucker, Project Management Essentials)
Alan Zucker of Project Management Essentials shared this story from his time managing financial reporting applications at a large company.
The finance organization had built hundreds of spreadsheets and databases to run its monthly close, a setup Zucker called “a Jenga puzzle waiting to fall apart.” The technology organization offered to replace it with a single application and said it could finish in 9 months.
The technology group said it did not need Zucker’s team, so they stayed out at the start. Six months in, the project had barely moved. The technology team realized it needed their help but resisted asking for it, and egos got bruised. The one-year mark passed with no end in sight, and Zucker’s counterpart on the technology side eventually blew up in anger and had to be replaced.
The new project lead reset the project. Much of the work on configuring the accounting rules and testing moved to Zucker’s team, and they asked for more time and money. She also changed the tone. When changes were needed, she skipped the long, scathing emails and “rolled up her sleeves to discuss options.”
The project took almost 2 years, and the result held up. The application cut the time it took to close the books, tightened financial controls, and stayed in use at the company for another 10 years.
Lesson: leadership decides how a troubled project recovers
The technology group committed to 9 months without the people whose knowledge and time it would need, then kept them out after the schedule slipped. Look at what the reset changed: much of the configuration and testing work moved to Zucker’s team. The original plan had never counted that capacity. Before you agree to a deadline, check the availability of everyone the work depends on, including teams outside your department. That is the job of capacity planning.
The person in charge mattered just as much. With largely the same team and requirements, one lead produced a stalled project and the next delivered a system the company relied on for a decade. If you are stepping into a project in that state, read this guide to taking over an existing project, or test your own style with our authentic leader quiz.
In Ganttic, everything starts with a Resource.
3. An acquisition, two undocumented systems, and a $2 million write-off (David Moise, Decide Consulting)
David Moise of Decide Consulting, a software development and staffing firm, worked for years as a developer before running software teams. His story dates from 2001.
Moise was brought in to manage a custom software project for a company whose president, he notes, went on to own an MLB team. Company A ran its operations on custom FoxPro software that had absorbed at least 25,000 hours of work and that Moise calls “marginally successful.” Then Company A bought Company B, which ran on its own custom COBOL system. Neither system had documentation, and Moise’s task was to rewrite both as one.
The mandate was set before he arrived: use FoxPro and go live in 4 months and 15 days. Company B’s team was on contract for 4 months as part of the buyout and stood to earn a large bonus if it finished before leaving. Company A, meanwhile, had a habit of 25-person meetings that ran for 6 hours.
Moise spent his first week working all of this out, then told the Director and the CIO the plan would fail:
Wrong technology. Wrong Team. Wrong time frame. Wrong motivation.
David Moise, Decide Consulting
He had not been there long enough to build trust. Company B’s team persuaded the CIO to remove him, and he was let go soon after. The company spent $2 million before it pulled the plug.
Lesson: fix communication before you fix the code
Look at how the constraints lined up. The FoxPro mandate built on the system that already had 25,000 hours in it, the deadline matched the contract term, and the bonus rewarded speed. Nobody checked whether those decisions fit together, and the one person who said they did not had not been there long enough to build trust. Moise raised the problem in week one, early enough to change course. Change management after an acquisition depends on that kind of warning reaching someone with the authority to act on it.
Skills were the other part of Moise’s verdict. The people on the rewrite were the team the buyout contract provided, and he judged them the wrong fit for the job. In Ganttic, Resource Data Fields store skills and certifications for each person, and you can filter the plan by them, so a gap like this shows up before kickoff.
4. A CRM with no scope and a $100,000-plus invoice (Laura Elliott, Beyond the Chaos)
Laura Elliott was a project manager at Beyond the Chaos, a firm that steps into projects to keep them on time and on budget. This nightmare was already underway when she started there.
The project was a large custom customer relationship management (CRM) tool for a small niche business. The client was eager, but the project never had a clear scope, and nobody spelled out the consequences when the client kept asking for more. Then an invoice for more than $100,000 reached the client’s lead contact, who panicked and threatened to sue. Nothing had been documented about what was agreed, so everyone started blaming everyone else.
The team tried to bring in project management while still chasing the timeline the client had been promised. That only fueled the frustration, Elliott says, “mostly because no one had taken the time to stop and ask what the client’s priorities were.”
With more than six years of project management behind her at the time, her advice is to stop. However urgent the deadline, once tension with a client gets this high, “you have to do a reset in order to move forward.”
The team eventually held a two-hour reset meeting to go through the remaining scope, define the next steps and the cost of each, and agree on a plan together. The following weeks stayed tense, but the project finished, and the client went on to work happily with its custom CRM.
Lesson: reset the plan with project shifting and clear milestones
The reset gave the project three things it had lacked: an agreed scope, a sequence of next steps, and a price for each step. The job afterward is keeping all three in front of everyone so the project does not drift again.
Put the agreed checkpoints on the timeline. In Ganttic, visual project milestones are set through a Date type project Data Field and show up as diamonds on the project’s timeline, so the team and the client see the same dates. When a reset moves the schedule, you can shift the whole project, or only the part before or after a chosen date, and its tasks and milestones move with it. Pair that with a resource management plan that records who will carry the remaining work.
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The project management mistakes behind all four stories
These projects ran in different decades for very different organizations, yet the project management mistakes behind them overlap.
Scope grew without a proper check
Robinson’s plugin skipped the usual vetting, and Elliott’s CRM grew with every client request while nobody explained the cost. Unclear objectives and shifting requirements both appear in Ganttic’s breakdown of why IT projects fail, and the problem is widespread. In its 2018 Pulse of the Profession, the Project Management Institute (PMI) reported that 52% of projects completed in the previous 12 months experienced scope creep. PMI, a professional association, conducted the survey itself online in October 2017, drawing on 4,455 project management professionals, 800 PMO directors, and 447 executives. The figure averages what respondents reported and dates from 2018, so read it as a sign of scale.
Deadlines came before the capacity check
The technology group in Zucker’s story promised 9 months before involving his team, which it later depended on.Moise’s 4 months and 15 days came from a contract term, set before he arrived. Checking who is actually available across departments before you commit is the core of resource management.
Nothing was written down
Moise inherited two systems with no documentation, and Elliott inherited a project with no record of what had been agreed. In both cases, the missing record turned every disagreement into an argument about blame.
Recovery started with a reset
The two projects that finished both stopped and re-planned. Zucker’s new lead reset the plan, moved work between teams, and asked for more time and money. Elliott’s team spent two hours redefining the remaining scope and its cost. Moise’s project, where the early warning led to his exit, is the one that was abandoned. For more habits that keep projects on track, see these secrets of a successful project manager.
Plan your next project with Ganttic
Even experienced PMs collect a few project management horror stories over a career. Ganttic’s project resource management software helps with the planning side: it maps each project’s tasks to the people, equipment, and other assets assigned to them on a visual timeline.
You pay for the resources you plan, and every plan includes unlimited users, each with the permissions you choose, so stakeholders and clients can follow the schedule without a paid seat.
Compare the pricing tiers, or read why we chose resource-based over user-based pricing!
To see how Ganttic would fit your projects, book a personal demo with our team.
Happy belated Halloween, and happy planning.