Understanding project failure

I found a blog dedicated to exploring the causes of IT project failures - at http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/. What I’ve read so far is about large projects but, in my experience, small projects fail for most of the same reasons. Worth reading even if your IT projects are on a smaller scale!

IT projects fail more often than not

Over half of IT projects fail to deliver – they are late, over budget or don’t do what the buyers expected. Why?

Most of the problems occur at the very start of the project. Fail to think through what you really really want, fail to write it down, fail to set expectations about what it will deliver – and the chances are that the project will fail or be considered to have failed.

Conversely, put the work into figuring out what you and the system’s users want, write it down as unambiguously as you can, set expectations about what can be done in the time or for the money you have, and you are a long way towards improving the chances of success of your IT project.