Transcript Project Failures - Texas Christian University

Project Failures
Can You Avoid Them?
Software Project Failures



Generally discovered post-mortem
Most projects are at least partial failures
Rarely caused by mysterious causes
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
There are myriad ways to fail…There
are only a very few ways to succeed !