Understanding the reasons of project failure based on the example of the Berlin-Brandenburg Airport 'Willy Brandt'

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, University of Applied Sciences Worms, language: English, abstract: The underlying paper was written with the purpose of understanding the reasons for project failure. Project failure in terms of project delays, cost increases and quality losses. In order to get a better understanding of the general failure reasons, the paper covers a real-time example of project failure. The chosen project is the construction project of the international airport Berlin Brandenburg (BER). The first chapter covers general aspects and characteristics of a project. Afterwards, the initial BER project plan and the current development state of the airport is explained. In the next chapter, the paper shows up a best-practice approach of how to successfully execute a construction project and how to meet arranged deliverables in a certain quality within the defined time and budget guidelines. Based on this knowledge, the following chapter deals with the actions that led to project failure of the BER project and shows up the deviations from the best-practice approach. It was concluded that several factors lead to project failure and that communication plays a significant role for project success.