I Project Awareness
How to Recognize a
Failing Project
1 Why Projects Fail
The data on project success rates are alarming. According to the Standish Groupâs CHAOS Report, based on biennial surveys of software project outcomes, about 75 percent of all software projects are delivered late or fail. The data also show that since 2002, the rate of successful project completion has dropped significantly.1
Delayed projects are not problematic simply because they are late. On a late project, significant planned functionality is often discarded in an effort to stay on schedule and keep costs down. So the average schedule overrun of about 120 percent and average cost overrun of 100 percent shown in Figure 1-1 are significantly understated. Completing projects often takes more than twice as long and costs twice as much as we estimate! How can it be that we havenât made progress in delivering software on time or under budget? In 1981, Barry Boehm provided a seven-step approach to estimating software projects in Software Engineering Economics. Yet most projects today do not use even this level of discipline in preparing estimates.
Steve McConnell, author of Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art, writes, âThe industry data show that the software industry has an underestimation problem. Before we can make our estimates more accurate, we need to start making the estimates bigger. That is the key challenge for many organizations.â2 Industry expert Capers Jones writes that the root cause of project failure is poor project management, not technical issues or the competence and ability of technical personnel.3
From Software Estimation, by Steve McConnell. Reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation.
The failure to adequately plan using useful and effective measures is the root cause of project failure. This book will enable you to save a failing project. Even better, it will enable you to manage projects while reducing the risk of failure.
Key Factors Leading to Failure
While many factors lead to the failure of a project, in the authorsâ experience, a few specific, easily recognizable factors signal serious problems that jeopardize project success:
Poorly defined requirements
Stakeholders have different expectations
Stakeholders have unrealistic expectations
There is no real need or demand for the product
There is a lack of user involvement in the project
Change management is lacking or ineffective
Problems are caught too late
There is no project champion.
4
Poorly Defined Requirements
Execution of the project is begun prematurely, before requirements are defined, analyzed, and agreed upon. The team then performs a great deal of technical work that lacks a focused vision of the real needs, objectives, and work products.
Scope Creep
New requirements and changes to requirements are accepted without any control or management of the requirements. This scope creep occurs on all projects and is one of the major reasons that projects get out of control. (Chapter 12 provides several suggestions for controlling scope creep.)
Stakeholders Have Different Expectations
A stakeholder is anyone who has an interest in the success or failure of a project. A critical basic foundation for successful project planning and execution is that all (or at least as many as possible) of the stakeholders need to be identified at the outset,5 and their objectives and expectations must be stated, refined, and clarified.
Project stakeholders may include the customer, end users, customer management, developerâs PM, developerâs management team, corporate stockholders, project team members, subcontractors, and the contracts office.
Writing a vision and scope document is an effective way to facilitate the process of identifying, refining, and clarifying stakeholder needs and expectations.6 This document should provide a vision for the project that is broad enough for all stakeholders to embrace, and it should clarify a reasonable scope (what is to be included or excluded). Youâll learn more about the vision and scope document in Chapter 12.
Figure 1-2 delineates each type of stakeholderâs expectations with regard to project success.
Managing these expectations is essential. Different stakeholder groups will have different needs and expectations. For example, customers may consider these factors when evaluating a project:
Project meets the agreed-upon requirements
Whether a team/partnership approach was used to plan and execute the project.
Users may have a somewhat different perspectiveâthey also are likely to be interested in timely completion of the project, but they may be more focused on the functional requirements and features of the delivered products, system, or software development effort than they are on completion within the allocated or planned budget.
Itâs important to realize that there may be several subcategories of users, and each subcategory may be primarily interested in a somewhat different set of functional capabilities. This is a major reason that the requirements elicitation methods and techniques you choose must provide a mechanism for prioritizing the requirements and helping each subcategory of users understand the vision, needs, and objectives of the other subcategory groups. (Requirements elicitation is the process of determining the real requirements. Real requirements are a subset of the stated requirements that are verifiable and prioritize needs for a particular system or capability.)7
The project developer/supplier is perhaps most interested in the team or partnership appro...