I’ve been doing this for 22 years and I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve had any project have anything go horribly wrong. We have had a couple of projects in all of those years where things didn’t go all the way right or we did have some issues. But what I have often found is that the projects where things went wrong was where certain members of the team were actually committed to them failing and not committed to their success.
So if there is any part of the team that’s not committed to the success of the project, then it will go wrong. Whether it really is wrong or not, that person will perceive that it went horribly wrong. So with any in-depth, expensive, long duration effort, you really do have to be committed to its success for it to be the right outcome or a good outcome.