Are you going to take a guess?
The reason is not usually because of technology.
The reason is usually connected to the project sociology.
What does this mean? It means people. We are a complex conglomerate of cells and when evaluating the success of IT projects most of us need to stop thinking that we are in the high-tech business and realise that we are actually in the human communication business.
This is what I’m getting out of the first chapter of Peopleware which is about productive projects and teams in the software development industry. The book reminds us that though we develop our products or organise our affairs using technology components, we do so via teams and projects.
The authors studied 500 project histories from real world development efforts and found:
- 15% of all projects were cancelled, postponed or the products were never used
- 25% of projects that lasted 25yrs or more failed to complete.
- For a huge majority there was not a single technological issue to explain the failure.
I haven’t been involved in as many software development projects as these guys, but their findings do not surprise me. In my limited experience, there are usually a variety of non-tech factors, usually relating to communication and information management, that hurt IT projects. E.g:
- Failing to communicate any changes appropriately to the rest of the project team resulting in people not ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’
- Failing to check the documents from which you are working to ensure that you are working to the correct /most recent spec or brief
- Making assumptions about what is needed and not communicating those assumptions resulting in loss of opportunity for those assumptions to be corrected
- Not having decent (or any) systems or processes in place to effectively and efficiently capture incoming information and direct the flow of information within the organisation
There are many others of course. So if we believe that people, and not technology, are responsible for the failure of development projects, what should we do about it? I guess the first thing would be to reflect on our deeply held views on the people we are managing. Later this week I’ll relay what Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister (the book’s authors) suggest.
StartupCafe 
This strikes me as highly implausible. It sounds to me like a case of the authors keeping on questioning until someone blamed a human for a technological failure. (Of course, technology is created by humans, so as Walt Paterson used to say of failures in the nuclear industry “it’s all human error” if you trace it back far enough. But if you’re going to do that, you don’t really need a study: you can just say “obviously, ultimately, it’s all human error: it’s not the silicon’s fault!”)
Let’s turn it round: if technology is almost never to blame for project failures, isn’t that rather amazing? I mean, given all the barely functional, buggy, oversold, poorly designed, underpowered, overambitious, over-complex, poorly specified, badly documented, inadequately tested and just downright broken software/hardware there is out there, how is it that none of that ever ends up causing projects to fail?
I can certainly think of a number of failed software projects where I think the most helpful way to look at the failure is exactly to say that the base technology used for it was principal reason for failure. Of course you can say that someone should have realised that the technology wasn’t up to it (sooner), or (in some cases) that a different technology could have been substituted, or that if the humans in the project had been better communicators/problem solvers/organizers they might have overcome the limitations of the technology. But that seems to me a case of “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” (or “thumb”, according to taste).
If there claim were simply “sometimes people blame technology for failures that, when analysed more carefully, were really human failures”, I wouldn’t have a problem. But this claim seems to go well beyond that.
Hello would you mind statiung which blog platform you’re using?
I’m going to stat mmy own blog soon but I’m having a hard timne selecting between BlogEngine/Wordpress/B2evolution and Drupal.
The reason I ask is because your layout seemms different then most
blogs and I’m looking for something completely unique.
P.S Sorry for being off-topic but I had to ask!