Why IT projects fail

The past years, many companies complained about IT projects. In general, IT projects tend to be late, over budget, and not fulfilling expectations. What is the reason for these complaints?

I think most projects fail because expectations are not aligned between stakeholders and projects.

All projects have several stakeholders. These stakeholders are (among others):

  • Business process owners
  • End users
  • The financial department
  • The system administrators (functional and technical)
  • etc.

Who decides if a project is a success?

If the expectations of a project meet the financial departments expectations and the end users expectations, but not the expectations of the system administrators, some stakeholders feel the project is a success, and others don’t. I think a project is only a success if all stakeholders are happy in the end.

All stakeholders all have expectations about the project. Sometimes these expectations are written requirements, but many expectations are implicit. Implicit requirements that are obvious to one or more stakeholders might not be so obvious to the project team.

An example can be the availability of the system. If the requirements say 99% availability (where the actual expectations are that the system is always up), the system administrators can use the 14 minutes per day (which 99% availability implies) to make a snapshot of a SAN for backup reasons. The business probably did not meant this, and thinks the project made a mistake.

Another example is the assumption that an web-enabled system works with older browsers (or with Firefox), where the developers used technology only available in Internet Explorer 6 and higher. The helpdesk probably will feel the project failed, where the only problem was a lack of communications of requirements.

Another issue is the expectation of the project planning. Sometimes the planning of a project is not based on realistic prognoses by experienced people, but on business requirements. The business timelines can be very important, but to make a project a success, the amount of work that can be done in a certain timeframe is limited. Either the scope of the project should become smaller, or the quality (and the success) of the project will be too low.

So, if the project has no knowledge of all the requirements and expectations, and if the project is faced with an impossible planning, it will certainly fail, no matter how hard the project staff is working.


This entry was posted on Friday 26 September 2008

Earlier articles

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Security at cloud providers not getting better because of government regulation

The cloud is as insecure as its configuration

Infrastructure as code

DevOps for infrastructure

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

(Hyper) Converged Infrastructure

Object storage

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV)

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

What's the point of using Docker containers?

Identity and Access Management

Using user profiles to determine infrastructure load

Public wireless networks

Supercomputer architecture

Desktop virtualization

Stakeholder management

x86 platform architecture

Midrange systems architecture

Mainframe Architecture

Software Defined Data Center - SDDC

The Virtualization Model

What are concurrent users?

Performance and availability monitoring in levels

UX/UI has no business rules

Technical debt: a time related issue

Solution shaping workshops

Architecture life cycle

Project managers and architects

Using ArchiMate for describing infrastructures

Kruchten’s 4+1 views for solution architecture

The SEI stack of solution architecture frameworks

TOGAF and infrastructure architecture

The Zachman framework

An introduction to architecture frameworks

How to handle a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack

Architecture Principles

Views and viewpoints explained

Stakeholders and their concerns

Skills of a solution architect architect

Solution architects versus enterprise architects

Definition of IT Architecture

What is Big Data?

How to make your IT "Greener"

What is Cloud computing and IaaS?

Purchasing of IT infrastructure technologies and services

IDS/IPS systems

IP Protocol (IPv4) classes and subnets

Infrastructure Architecture - Course materials

Introduction to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

Fire prevention in the datacenter

Where to build your datacenter

Availability - Fall-back, hot site, warm site

Reliabilty of infrastructure components

Human factors in availability of systems

Business Continuity Management (BCM) and Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

Performance - Design for use

Performance concepts - Load balancing

Performance concepts - Scaling

Performance concept - Caching

Perceived performance

Ethical hacking

The first computers

Open group ITAC /Open CA Certification


Recommended links

Ruth Malan
Gaudi site
Esther Barthel's site on virtualization
Eltjo Poort's site on architecture


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The postings on this site are my opinions and do not necessarily represent CGI’s strategies, views or opinions.

 

Copyright Sjaak Laan