Project Failures

1. Project Failures Can You Avoid Them?

2. Software Project Failures • Generally discovered post-mortem • Most projects are at least partial failures • Rarely caused by mysterious causes

3. Costs to Industry • $75 Billion per year • 50% of projects canceled before they get completed • 53% cost over 189% of original budget • Only 16% are on time and under budget

4. What are the causes for this? • Poor user input • Not close enough to the users • Business as usual • If developers don’t understand, they don’t know what questions to ask

5. What are the causes for this? • Stakeholder Conflicts • Assumed all would get everything they wanted • People may not like each other • Developers may not know who the real stakeholders are • Who will ultimately declare if the project is a success or not? • Lack of agreement on priorities

6. What are the causes for this? • Vague Requirements • Too vague to determine actual size of the project • Lack of stable requirements • Architectures and processes are not change friendly • Poorly established guidelines that determines who, when and how requirements can be changed

7. What are the causes for this? • Poor Cost and Estimation • Attempts to circumvent a project’s natural minimum limits will backfire • Putting a team under pressure does not guarantee they can deliver anything • Tend to skip on quality checks • Skimping leads to more rework, endless testing, more cost and takes longer

8. What are the causes for this? • Skills that Do Not Match the Job • Managers perform poorly on projects that do not match their strengths • Skill set for management and programming are disjoint • Need to attract and retain most highly skilled and productive people • If need to make the choice go for the best manager over techie

9. What are the causes for this? • Hidden Costs of Going “Lean and Mean” • Failure may be viewed as a direct result of underperformance • Goals that are simply too lofty • Many developers are doing tasks that have nothing to do with the project

10. What are the causes for this? • Failure to Plan • People don’t always plan • Don’t plan as they believe it will always be wrong • Think planning gets in the way of real work – coding and testing • Difference between speed and progress

11. What are the causes for this? • Communication Breakdown • Projects get so large that people forget to communicate causing redundancy • One person doesn’t have the entire overview • Need to know how each piece fits together

12. What are the causes for this? • Poor Architecture • Need flexible architecture • Code tied too closely to operating system causing failures when updated • What is likely to change • If done correctly no one will notice, if done wrong everyone will suffer • Design for what you have not yet thought of – the future

13. What are the causes for this? • Late Failure Warning Signals • Your schedule and budget ware determined by edict by people you are afraid to say “No” to • It is politically unwise either to say or show the estimate is far from achievable • All your milestones involve diagrams, designs and other documents that do not involve working code • No one dares to inform upper management of the pending disaster • Not acceptable to ignore coding being tied to milestones

14. There are myriad ways to fail…There are only a very few ways to succeed !