Nothing makes your day worse than a CNN News crew standing on your front step when you wake up in the morning. You may think that only happens in movies, but if your project loses enough stockholder or taxpayer money, is months late, or fails to provide the promised value, it happens. As basic as it sounds, you need to understand what makes a failure. By looking at numerous examples in both the public and private sector and understanding the evolution of those failures, you can improve the odds of the projects on your watch succeeding. Past and current examples from in-the-press to in-the-courtroom failures will be used as case studies to analyze where they went wrong and what could be done to avert a similar catastrophe in your organization. You will be asked to provide your insight and experience on failure and correction process as we talk about failures like Heathcare.gov, Cover Oregon, the Sydney Opera House, an anonymous (but recent and unpublicized) litigation, and the ongoing public investigation into the State of Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance. The discussion will then turn to the reasonable and prudent level of governance, assessments, health checks, and audits that should done on your projects and organization to minimize the chances that a major failure will happen on your watch. By the end of the presentation you will have a take away list of actions that you, your team, and your leaders should perform.