Standish: Project Success Rates Improved Over 10 Years

Twelve years ago my technical writing, training and usability company salespeople used to quote a new study called "Chaos" done by The Standish Group of West Yarmouth, MA, to show the desperate condition of IT-generated projects. We had solutions, of course, centered around communications and more frequent feedback. At that time, IT project failure rates ran close to one-third. Adding in troubled projects, brought the complete-success rate down to about 20%.

Now some good news, The Standish Group has updated the study every two years, and things have improved, as the article below from softwaremag.com shows. Note that projects have gotten smaller and more iterative. This means more cycles of user feedback are being incorporated. In other words, the SYSTEM for developing has better communication built in, which is particularly responsive to changing conditions. David Orr

"The 10th edition of the annual CHAOS report from The Standish Group, which researches the reasons for IT project failure in the United States, indicates that project success rates have increased to 34 percent of all projects. That's more than a 100-percent improvement from the success rate found in the first study in 1994.

Asked for the chief reasons project success rates have improved, Standish Chairman Jim Johnson says, "The primary reason is the projects have gotten a lot smaller. Doing projects with iterative processing as opposed to the waterfall method, which called for all project requirements to be defined up front, is a major step forward." The Standish Group has studied over 40,000 projects in 10 years to reach the findings. Project failures have declined to 15 percent of all projects," more.........http://www.softwaremag.com/L.cfm?doc=newsletter/2004-01-15/Standish
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