4 out of 10

According to the Standish Group's just-released report, CHAOS Summary 2009; 32% of IT projects are on time, on budget, with the required business functions; 44% of IT projects are either late, over budget, and/or missing required business functions; the remaining IT projects (24%) are cancelled. This means in general a new IT has about a 4 in 10 shot of being a successful business project, which means that the odds are that it will most likely fail in some way. In fact out of 100 IT projects about 25 of them will be cut!

In fact it is even worst than it seems, these numbers are worst than last year's. Believe it or not, these are the lowest number in the last five years!

So what does this mean to you (assuming someone is reading this and that they work in IT)? Well, it means that most of the projects that you have work on in the resent pass have failed in some way. It also means that IT as a whole needs to improve their delivery of projects.

So what can IT do? We can try harder at understanding our business clients. The other day I saw a blog that got me thinking about how if you really want to understand your business clients you will have to become one, you will have to "Eat Your Own Dog Food". I read some where, that Amazon developers have to sometime every couple of years shadowing their business clients. I think this is a great idea, if you see how your business client really uses your software you will be better able to understand there needs and their pain points.

Now I do not think that sitting with your business clients every couple of years will allow IT projects to become more successful, but I think it would help.

Use Real Business Function to Measure Progress

Today during lunch I attended the ThoughtWorks' Webinar "The Agile PMO". Not being a PM or anything like that I cannot comment on the content other than to say that I learned a lot about what PMOs do. But, that is not the point of this post.

At the Webinar Ross Pettit was talking about when a PM reports status to the PMO they should measure that status in terms of Business functions. To me this made so much since, I cannot believe I never thought of it before. I believe on most of my projects, many aspects of the project are 90% done for more than 90% of the project (this goes double for all the projects that fail or are late).

This 90% done for 90% of the time is not really any one's fault. You see most people in IT are optimistic (or they are very jaded and pessimistic). This leads people to believe that things will get done quicker than they normally do. That is why I think it is a great idea to report things in terms of how much Business functionality is done. If you report the status in terms of Business functionality, then all parties involved would be able to understand the status. This would help in avoiding the 90% done for 90% of the time, because either the Business functionality is available or it is not.