Ooooh...InfoWorld has the top 6 myths of IT. I think I disagree with everything they say, and they don't even really put forth an argument so there's not even much to respond to. For example, when it comes to "Most IT Projects fail", they take a comprehensive study done of 13,000 projects (just one such study performed in the past 20 years) and attack it with a couple of anecdotal quotes from 3 different people. And still the best that they can come up with is, 50% of projects really fail to deliver significant functionality or features and 15% of those get cancelled or never delivered.
They also have a stunningly obvious graph showing that small projects succeed more often than large projects. Well duh. We've got 40 years of work in software engineering that shows as projects scale up, they get exponentially more complex and likely to fail. Thanks for the newsflash. I mean look at the more than 10 million entry; only 2% of projects succeed. Two percent. And I'd venture to say that projects in that range are the ones most critical to the business. Even at 15% of projects being cancelled outright, can you imagine if 15% of civil engineering projects were cancelled completely? People would be a little pissed if the bay bridge had a 15% chance of not getting finished.
Check out this view of failure:
But AMR’s Shepherd has another view, which he says is more realistic. “Failure would be a situation where orders stopped being taken, or the books couldn’t be closed, or the project itself was simply abandoned,” Shepherd says. “That’s rare."
Uhhh...how about if we define failure as the failure to either a) save more money than the project cost, b) increase revenue more than the project cost, or c) some combnation of the two to get back the project's cost. That should be the real criteria since that's the goal of the business.
Sigh. I hate our industry sometimes.
update: I'm sorry, "X doesn't scale" is a correctly identified myth. The author of that one actually knows something. Neat.
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