A Replicated Survey of IT Software Project Failures

Introduction:

The prevailing view that there’s a software crisis arose when the Standish Group published its 1994 Chaos report, which indicated a high cancellation rate for software projects. But a number of practitioners and researchers have questioned its findings and criticized it for not disclosing its methodology, lack of peer review, inconsistent reporting, and misconceptions about the definition of failure. Since 1994, other researchers have published evidence on project cancellation (see the sidebar). However, this evidence is somewhat equivocal because many of these studies weren’t peer reviewed and didn’t publish their methodologies, which makes judging the evidence’s quality difficult.

So, the software community still needs a reliable global estimate of software project cancellation rates that will help us determine whether there’s a software crisis. Knowing the project cancellation rate will let software organizations benchmark their performance to see how they compare to others in the industry. We conducted a replicated international Web survey of IT departments (developing management information systems) in 2005 and 2007. We aimed to

• Estimate IT projects’ actual cancellation rates,
• Determine what factors have the biggest impact on cancellation,
• Estimate the success rate of projects that deliver, and
• Determine whether project size affects cancellation rates and project success.