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Failure Causes in IT Project Management

March 12, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Risk Identification, Risk Management

Failure Causes in IT Project Management
By Dr.Russell Archibald And Darci Prado

In a 2007 survey, participants were instructed to point their three main project failures. Following are the results:

All Maturity Levels

  1. Frequent scope changes: 73%
  2. Unattainable deadlines: 51%
  3. Incorrect or incomplete Feasibility Study (or Business Case or Business Plan): 27%
  4. Precarious project management methods, tools and techniques: 22%
  5. Lack of resources (human, financial and material): 22%
  6. Insufficient or inadequate commitment from senior management: 22%
  7. Inadequate risk management: 22%
  8. Project managers with insufficient management skills: 20%
  9. Insufficient or inadequate IT team’s technical skills: 13%
  10. Insufficient or inadequate commitment from the involved user areas: 7%

Looking at the causes for each maturity level we see some different numbers.

Maturity Level 1

  1. Scope changes: 50%
  2. Precarious PM methods, tools and techniques: 50%
  3. Insufficient or inadequate commitment from the involved user areas: 42%

Note the presence of “precarious PM methods, tools and techniques”, which was expected for this maturity level.

Maturity Level 2

  1. Scope changes: 83%
  2. Unattainable deadlines: 65%
  3. Insufficient or inadequate commitment from the involved user areas: 30%

The “precarious project management methods, tools and techniques” cause shows up with 17%.

Maturity Level 3

  1. Scope changes: 78%
  2. Insufficient or inadequate commitment from senior management: 56%
  3. Incorrect or incomplete Feasibility Study: 44%
  4. Unattainable deadlines: 44%

The cause “precarious project management methods, tools and techniques” did not occur (0%) at Maturity Level 3.

Unfortunately, the sample size did not allow an analysis for maturity levels 4 and 5.

This article is an excerpt from the research paper: Maturity and Success in I.T. Project Management

Dr. Russell D. Archibald, PhD (Hon), MSc, Fellow PMI and APM/IPMA, PMP, is one of the six founding members of the Project Management Institute. Now semi-retired, he has many years of management experience in engineering and operations with a variety of major US corporations in Europe and South America as well as the US. He has made major contributions to the understanding of project management, is author of the best selling 2003 book “Managing High-Technology Programs and Projects” (published also in Russian, Chinese, and Italian), has trained more than a thousand program and project managers and project specialists around the world, and has consulted in project management to clients in 14 countries on 4 continents. E-mail: russell_archibald@yahoo.com. Website: www.russarchibald.com.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 and is filed under Risk Identification, Risk Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 people have left comments

Very interesting results. Is there a reference for the study and/or any resulting publications?

David Jones wrote on November 14, 2009 - 2:49 am | Visit Link

@David,

The reference is the research paper linked above. The authors did some huge research and analyzed data from several sources to reach those results.

PM Hut wrote on November 14, 2009 - 10:07 am | Visit Link

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