62 percent of IT projects fail. Why?

CIO.com cites a Dynamic Markets survey of 800 IT managers, reporting that 62 percent of IT projects fail to meet their schedules. Other data:

• 49 percent suffered budget overruns
• 47 percent had higher-than-expected maintenance costs, and
• 41 percent failed to deliver the expected business value and ROI

This wouldn't be so bad, CIO.com notes, if it weren't for the fact that the numbers haven't appreciably improved over the past decade. In some cases, they've gotten worse.

Why? Why do 25 percent of all IT projects get canceled before completion? CIO.com cites two reasons:

1. IT departments don't take into account the time required between design and development and
2. QA is not adequately understood and budgeted into projects' timelines.

One other thing that I've seen fairly often is a disconnect between the IT department and the business owners who sponsor IT projects. The two often have very different ideas as to what they want.

From the business owner side, they are often more enamored of demos than technology. This is sometimes good but also just as often bad. One customer of mine has had its Alfresco implementation delayed by a year because a three-month project with a proprietary product has taken over 15 months. The proprietary software that IT is attempting to deploy looks great in demos, but is a pile of potty to deploy.

Other times, it's the IT department that leads with technology and overlooks business owners' requirements. I've had this early in my company's product lifecycle when it showed great promise but little polish. We had a customer attempt to deploy the product for something it was ill-equipped to do...and the business owner rejected it.

I'm not sure what the solution is for this disconnect, but I suspect it's the cause of more IT project failures than most others. Any suggestions?

[mm0]

These surveys turn up every year or so, and they are always the same. When I got my software engineering degree we reviewed IT project stats from the early 1980's with exactly the same data, +/-10%

The SE literature covers pretty well why this is the case, but few people in IT read it, and few managers in either IT or the business have the stomach for putting the engineering discipline and process in place that would address the primary contributing factors. The one area the SE folks fall short on is that they focus on development, without taking into account the conflicting resource problems of maintenance and new development that tend to sap IT projects.

Still, reading a little Fred Brooks and Barry Boehm wouldn't hurt most managers in IT.

[justinbmeyer]

I think you misstated the 62 percent. In CIO it reads:

62 percent of organizations experienced IT projects that failed to meet their schedules.

I don't think that means 62 percent of projects fail. Only that 62 percent of organizations have had projects that didn't meet their schedules.

[preciouskeepsake]

Perhaps you need to read the first part over; here it is: "CIO.com cites a Dynamic Markets survey of 800 IT managers, reporting that 62 percent of IT projects fail to meet their schedules. Other data:

* 49 percent suffered budget overruns
* 47 percent had higher-than-expected maintenance costs, and
* 41 percent failed to deliver the expected business value and ROI"

[AlfioSauri]

I will go back to the basics in communication and state what business objective drives the technological solution. Without such basic understanding, we cannot assess properly the owners or CEO's expectations.