Expectations vs. reality

During my 26 years of engineering, I had my fair share of failed projects. These projects never failed due sabotage or lack of effort. In the aftermath, everybody, from engineers to the customer, was miserable. It makes no sense to blame the people in the project for not having tried hard enough, because they did their best, even burning out in the process. 

The root cause of defeat was always a gap between expectations and reality. Reality includes difficulty of the problem, available budget and quality of personnel. Not understanding reality resulted in short deadlines and low budgets, which in turn assured failure. If expectations were more in-line with reality, all that money and effort would not have gone to waste and a valuable end result could have been achieved, avoiding lots of unnecessary suffering. The only way out of this spiral is having competent, experienced managers who have a strong link to reality, and therefore can help align expectations with resources. Further reading.