Week 1 - Blog - Why IT Projects Fail?

From my reading of Lars Mieritz's article based on why projects fail, I have deduced that large projects are more likely to fail compared to that of smaller IT Projects as size really does matter. Large projects require more effort and a vast amount of time being put into them while smaller projects are easier to manage. Larger IT Projects require bigger budgets which increases the level of risk of projects failing.

  • Gartner's Survey of 150 participants saw that Large IT Projects budgets exceeded $1 million and had a 72% success rate compared to a 28% failure rate.
  • Medium IT Projects had budgets between $350,000 - $1 million with a 75% success rate compared to 25% failure rate.
  • Finally Smaller IT Projects had budgets less than $350,000 and had a higher success rate of 80% compared to 20% failure rate.

From the failure rates it is clearly more risky to pursue a Large IT project 28% compared to a Smaller IT project at 20%. There are many reasons for projects failing such as functionality issues, substantially late, high cost variance, cancelled after launch, poor quality and other reasons (lack of leadership, no plan or timeline, lack of testing).
                               
                                                Small                            Medium                     Large

Functionality Issues                   22%                             24%                          22%
Substantially Late                      23%                             24%                          28%
High Cost Variance                    14%                             22%                          24%
Cancelled After Launch             16%                             12%                          11%
Poor Quality                               17%                             12%                          11%
Other Reasons                            8%                                6%                            7%

From the above information I believe that Smaller IT Projects failed higher in the poor quality and cancelled after launch because the quality level of products for smaller IT projects would be inferior compared to that of the larger companies and it would cost less to cancel smaller projects compared to larger projects as less is invested in smaller projects.
Large IT Projects that failed scored higher in the functionality issues, substantially and high cost variance as these reasons would spell death for Large IT projects as issues arising in these sectors would stop large projects from succeeding but wouldn't be as problematic for smaller projects.

Credit: Lars Mieritz, Bernard Marr - Forbes

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