Project failure is seriously much more interesting to discuss than project success. I think people remember bad things more than good things: a kid is more likely to remember the time they put their hand on a hot stove more than the hundreds of times they saw their parents not touch a hot stove. (Some people need to touch hot stoves more than others to get the message, but that's another topic for another time.
Real-life project failures abound, and some of them can be interesting, depending on how they're written up. Fictional project failures, though, because they can be over-the-top, are inherently more interesting, involving, say, dinosaurs, or, another of my favorites, Star Wars. I've used scenes from the Star Wars movies to discuss social engineering:
Star Wars in general is full of information security metaphors. Kellman Meghu, a Canadian security professional, did a SecTor 2012 talk, "How NOT to do Security: Lessons Learned from the Galactic Empire" (http://2012.video.sector.ca/video/51119497) It's nearly an hour long, but worth every moment. Darth Vader is cast as the CISO at one point, if you need further incentive to watch.
Another entertaining (and shorter) video presentation is from Darin on YouTube, who uses Star Wars to explain industrial control system security to people who know nothing about security: "Securing your ICS with Lessons Learned from the Death Star"
I literally guffawed when this slide came up:
Daniel Solove, a privacy scholar, penned "If the Empire in Star Wars Had Big Data..." (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/empire-star-wars-had-big-data-daniel-solove) as a privacy parable, but goes into data security, as well. Perhaps Equifax could learn from his tip on good data breach response.
Even the latest Star Wars movie, Rogue One, gets the information security treatment: Carol Pinchefsky's "5 lessons IT can learn from 'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story'" (https://insights.hpe.com/articles/5-lessons-it-can-learn-from-rogue-one-a-star-wars-story-1702.html) details some very relevant information security parallels, including the importance of authentication and encryption. Not to mention, was everyone else as horrified as I when they realized that there was no offsite backup of the data center on Scarif?
To tie this all back to project management specifically, Emily Bonnie did a hilarious infographic: "10 Reasons the Death Star Project Failed" at https://www.wrike.com/blog/10-reasons-the-death-star-failed/ She includes the usual project management failure suspects such as incomplete project requirements, bad risk handling, poor leadership, failure to look at alternatives, and bad resource handling, among others:
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