Software project failure rates are at an all time high.

Last month (June 2009), the Standish Group based in Boston released its latest report on “IT Project Success Rates” and the results do not  look good.  Only 32 percent of IT projects were delivered on time, within budget and with the required functionality.  Forty-four percent were delivered late, went over budget or did not meet specifications. The remaining 24% were cancelled due to unspecified reasons.  Meredith Levinson writes in CIO magazine that some of the most common mistakes in IT project management are:

1. Projects are not staffed with the right people with the right skills.

2. Projects lack experienced project managers.  While agile methodologies decry the “command and control” approach used by project managers, lack of governance can lead to chaos with projects spiraling out of control.

3. Repeatable and standardized processes, which are essential to continuous process improvements as advocated by CMMI and Six Sigma, are not followed.

4. The flip side is that IT gets hamstrung by too many processes. IT needs to find the right balance between agility and predictability.

5. Change management is absent.

6. Up-to-date data on the status of the project is missing. The metrics used to determine progress are either measured incorrectly or inherently flawed.

7. Problems are ignored and their impact on the project are not fully assessed.

8. Scope of the project is not accurately defined.

9. Project interdependencies are not studied and evaluated.

10. Murphy’s Law is ignored. Stuff happens and IT is surprised! Risk management  – qualification and quantification of risks, and risk mitigation planning are woefully inadequate.

11. IT does not push back on unreasonable deadlines.

12. The technical team and business stakeholders do not speak the same language, i.e., communication between the two groups needs to improve.

How do you prevent your project from failing? Look out for warning signs. Define you KPIs to gauge the health of the project and keep a close watch on them. The earlier you can spot trouble higher is the probability that the project can be saved. Don’t play the blame game. Find out what’s wrong and come up with a course of action to fix it.