Generally the projects taken up by IT industries that are not as well established as the banking and insurance industries fail due to certain reasons. And in general the project manager is to blame for this failure of the project. The PM who may be in charge of the project may be responsible in one or the other way, but the whole blame cannot be put on the PM. There are other reasons too for an Information Technology sectors project failure. Moreover every project has its pros and cons, the PM has to take up the project that is allotted to him by his superiors, if the actual base of the project is not good and the project fails, then how is the PM who is under the orders of his superior to be responsible for the whole failure. The PM can do everything in his power to avoid failure by taking care of a certain steps and keep the project safe.
These few steps that should be taken care by the manager are as follows; the PM should take care that there is proper user involvement in the project, because in general if there is no user involvement in the project then the management lacks the commitment toward the project, in this case the PM can be blamed. If the project has long or unrealistic time lines then the management has to see to that the project does not become obsolete or unusable for the company or the client. The PM's main aim should be to finish the possible as early as possible.
If the client does not specify any requirements then the project management just assumes what are the necessities of the project and also of the client and do something of their own, in such cases the client will reject the project as it may have not been what he expected. Under this kind of circumstances the PM and the management together should put various ideas in front of the client, make several brain storming sessions along with them, then select the ideal that is better for the client and implement that idea so that when the end result comes the both the management of project and the client are satisfied by the outcome of the project.
The project fails if the management cannot accept change and cannot implement the change. The PM has to see to that the project has a proper change management system that will allow the project to make changes according to the will and wish of the client. The testing group in the project or the developers should make a lot of testing on the process of the project, or the market reach of the project, to ensure that the project once it is in the market will be readily acceptable and will make the right impression that it was supposed to make. If the PM does not implement these simple rules then the project is sure to be a failure.