(Originally posted on May 13th, 2009)

The 2009 Standish report on the success of IT projects is out. Perhaps surprisingly, it shows that there has an increase in failure of IT projects, from previous years

http://www.standishgroup.com/newsroom/chaos_2009.php

“This year’s results show a marked decrease in project success rates, with 32% of all projects succeeding which are delivered on time, on budget, with required features and functions” says Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group, “44% were challenged which are late, over budget, and/or with less than the required features and functions and 24% failed which are cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used.”

In my opinion, the increase in failures is due to a few more or less obvious factors:

- technology has been increased in complexity

- adoption of Agile practices has been surprisingly slow

- there is a difficult economic environment, with scarcer resources (such as investment money) leading to more stressful and error-prone environments

To these, I’d like to add Jeff Sutherland’s remarks that with most current practices, project success doesn’t pay because …

“* Industry incentives now are for projects to be late.

*Many vendors only make money if the project is late

and over budget due to change requests and building

functionality the end users do not want.

*CIOs participate in this dysfunctional behavior using

their current proposal and contracting process.

*The whole industry could be viewed as driven by bad

incentives and faulty practices”

(http://jeffsutherland.com/scrum/2008/08/agile-2008-money-for-nothing.html)