The Human Factor in Software Engineering

I would say that software projects fail for the same reasons why all the rest fails, too. People are badly organized and overwhelmed by the number of e-mails coming in, the amount of work distributed to them and all other requirements.
Instead of organizing better and working harder, people survive by "setting their own priorities" and "thinking positive and not allowing others to put pressure on them". With the result that e-mails are not answered and people do not even feel guilty for not answering. They have lots of excuses like "the header did not say it is important" or "if an e-mail is not announced by a phone call, I consider it to be not important". Many tasks distributed on people are not done, endangering the success of a complete team´s project. Here, again, a lot of strange excuses are acceptable like "I was told only once. So, I could not know that my results are really needed" or "I saw that you all work a lot, so I thought that someone of you might have done it already".
Anyway, stress is an excuse always acceptable. And who of us has no stress?
Well, OK, back to work. I have a deadline today.