4.2 Costs Beyond the Price Tag

Why Do Technology Projects Fail?

Even though information systems represent the largest portion of capital spending at most firms, an astonishing one in three technology development projects fail to be successfully deployed (Dignan, 2007). Imagine if a firm lost its investment in one out of every three land purchases, or when building one in three factories. These statistics are dismal! Writing in IEEE Spectrum, risk consultant Robert Charette provides a sobering assessment of the cost of software failures, stating, “The yearly tab for failed and troubled software conservatively runs somewhere from $60 to $70 billion in the United States alone. For that money, you could launch the space shuttle one hundred times, build and deploy the entire 24-satellite Global Positioning System, and develop the Boeing 777 from scratch—and still have a few billion left over” (Charette, 2005).

Why such a bad track record? Sometimes technology itself is to blame, other times it’s a failure to test systems adequately, and sometimes it’s a breakdown of process and procedures used to set specifications and manage projects. In one example, a multimillion-dollar loss on the NASA Mars Observer was traced back to a laughably simple oversight—Lockheed Martin contractors using English measurements, while the folks at NASA used the metric system (Lloyd, 1999). Yes, a $125 million taxpayer investment was lost because a bunch of rocket scientists failed to pay attention to third-grade math. When it comes to the success or failure of technical projects, the devil really is in the details.

Projects rarely fail for just one reason. Project post-mortems often point to a combination of technical, project management, and business decision blunders. The most common factors include the following²:

• Unrealistic or unclear project goals
• Poor project leadership and weak executive commitment
• Inaccurate estimates of needed resources
• Badly defined system requirements and allowing “feature creep” during development
• Poor reporting of the project’s status
• Poor communication among customers, developers, and users
• Use of immature technology
• Unmanaged risks
• Inability to handle the project’s complexity
• Sloppy development and testing practices
• Poor project management
• Stakeholder politics
• Commercial pressures (e.g., leaving inadequate time or encouraging corner-cutting)

Managers need to understand the complexity involved in their technology investments, and that achieving success rarely lies with the strength of the technology alone.

But there is hope. Information systems organizations can work to implement procedures to improve the overall quality of their development practices. Mechanisms for quality improvement include capability maturity model integration (CMMI), which gauge an organization’s process maturity and capability in areas critical to developing and deploying technology projects, and provides a carefully chosen set of best practices and guidelines to assist quality and process improvement¹ (Kay, 2005).

Firms are also well served to leverage established project planning and software development methodologies that outline critical business processes and stages when executing large-scale software development projects. The idea behind these methodologies is straightforward—why reinvent the wheel when there is an opportunity to learn from and follow blueprints used by those who have executed successful efforts. When methodologies are applied to projects that are framed with clear business goals and business metrics, and that engage committed executive leadership, success rates can improve dramatically (Shenhar & Dvir, 2007).

While software development methodologies are the topic of more advanced technology courses, the savvy manager knows enough to inquire about the development methodologies and quality programs used to support large scale development projects, and can use these investigations as further input when evaluating whether those overseeing large scale efforts have what it takes to get the job done.