2009: A Tough Year for Software Projects

Submitted by doug.wilson on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 16:00
The Standish Group's just-released report, "CHAOS Summary 2009," "This year's results show a marked decrease in project success rates, with 32% of all projects succeeding which are delivered on time, on budget, with required features and functions" says Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group, "44% were challenged which are late, over budget, and/or with less than the required features and functions and 24% failed which are cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used."
"These numbers represent a downtick in the success rates from the previous study, as well as a significant increase in the number of failures", says Jim Crear, Standish Group CIO, "They are low point in the last five study periods. This year's results represent the highest failure rate in over a decade"

I thought it was just me, but it looks as though some statistics are bearing up the notion that software success became more difficult over the past 12 months.  What are the reasons for the change?  In our markets, we see a growing gap between what the business needs to be successful and the requirements that are translated to the development staff.  Oftentimes we expect agile processes or tools to try and fill in the gaps, but what is critical is the ability to effectively design around the critical success factors of the project.

The state of Indiana just spent over $300MM with IBM learning that sometimes you do get fired for hiring IBM.  IBM's improved workflow solution designed to create efficient welfare claims processing and case management simply gummed up the works of an elaborate, highly customizable case management communication process.

Sometimes less is more.  Figuring out your key drivers to success, protytping aggressively and failing early all could have saved the State of Indiana, by our estimates, around $30MM.

How much can you save?

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