Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile

6.4. Software Projects Fail: Why Are We Surprised?

IT projects fail. Most IT projects now use commodity hardware, so it is usually the software side that fails. This may be bespoke development, the configuration or customization of complex packages such as SAP or the roll-out to end-users. Examples are easy to find – just read the newspaper or news web sites.

Depending on whose statistics you look at, you can find that 30 % of projects are cancelled before completion, 40 % fail to achieve their objectives and 50 % see implementation as unsuccessful – perhaps 70 % are seen in some way as unsuccessful. The figure could be higher, since many companies don't like to discuss their internal developments. Failures are common in the public sector too, but since these organizations can't hide their failures they tend to get more publicity.

Software development programmes are not alone in experiencing high failure rates. According to some reports, 70 % of all change programmes fail too. Since bespoke software development is just one part of a wider change programme, it is subject to the same 70 % failure rate.

Why, then, is anybody surprised that so many IT projects fail? It isn't necessarily the software that is failing, but the wider change programme. We should expect 70 % of projects to fail even before we consider the technical issues.

However, separating cause and effect in these failures is difficult. Probably the majority of corporate change programmes today involve an element of ...