Preventing slips, overruns, and cancellations: Application of system accident investigations and theory to the understanding and prevention of engineering project failures.

Abstract

Organizations that develop or operate complex engineering systems are plagued by systems engineering failures like schedule overruns, budget exceedances, and project cancellations. Unfortunately, there is not much actionable guidance on why these failures happen or how to prevent them. Our approach contains two novel aspects. First, we argue that system accidents and other failures in systems engineering are manifestations of similar underlying problems. Therefore, we can leverage the literature on accident causation and the many publicly available accident investigation reports to better understand how and why failures in systems engineering occur, and to identify ways of preventing them. Second, to address the lack of concrete guidance on identifying and preventing incipient failures, we provide specific examples of each type of failure cause and of the recommendations for preventing these causes. We analyzed a set of 30 accidents and 33 project failures, spanning a range of industries, and found 23 different failure causes, most of which appear in both accidents and other project failures, suggesting that accidents and project failures do happen in similar was. We also identified 16 different recommended remedial actions. We link these causes and recommendations in a cause-recommendation network, and associate over 900 specific examples of how these causes manifested in failures, and over 600 specific examples of the associated recommended remedial actions, with each cause or recommendation.