Factors Influencing the Success or Failure of Project
Factors influencing the success or failure of large scale projects
Introduction
Projects can be difficult to plan and manage. Even with a good plan there is no guarantee that the project will be successful. As the scale of the project gets larger the complexities involved in managing it increase and the likelihood of failure increases. Very large scale projects, like the ones I am reporting on involve many internal and external factors which can contribute to the success or failure of the project. Many large scale projects carried out by government are failures, even though they may eventually deliver what was expected. The failure is often in terms of timescale, costs or system errors. These factors may be internal to the project, such as the skills of the team working on the project, or external, such as the business changing in such a way that the project becomes irrelevant to the current needs. The Standish Group are a well known organisation in project management and in a report published in 1994 (Chaos: charting the seas of information technology) they said that: • • • 16.2% of projects were successful (on budget and on time) 52.7% were challenged (completed and operational, but over budget, over time and offering fewer features than originally agreed) 31.1% were project impaired (cancelled)
Their 2001 report showed that lessons were being learned and that the percentage of projects which were in the successful category had gone up to 28%. This is still very limited success. The majority of these were small projects, within a 6 month time scale and with up to 6 staff directly involved Many studies have been carried out as to what makes the project successful or a failure. Below are some of the success factors and some of the failure factors.
Success Factors
User involvement
When the user is involved from the beginning of the project the project team will be getting input from the people who are going to be most affected by the system that is being
Introduction
Projects can be difficult to plan and manage. Even with a good plan there is no guarantee that the project will be successful. As the scale of the project gets larger the complexities involved in managing it increase and the likelihood of failure increases. Very large scale projects, like the ones I am reporting on involve many internal and external factors which can contribute to the success or failure of the project. Many large scale projects carried out by government are failures, even though they may eventually deliver what was expected. The failure is often in terms of timescale, costs or system errors. These factors may be internal to the project, such as the skills of the team working on the project, or external, such as the business changing in such a way that the project becomes irrelevant to the current needs. The Standish Group are a well known organisation in project management and in a report published in 1994 (Chaos: charting the seas of information technology) they said that: • • • 16.2% of projects were successful (on budget and on time) 52.7% were challenged (completed and operational, but over budget, over time and offering fewer features than originally agreed) 31.1% were project impaired (cancelled)
Their 2001 report showed that lessons were being learned and that the percentage of projects which were in the successful category had gone up to 28%. This is still very limited success. The majority of these were small projects, within a 6 month time scale and with up to 6 staff directly involved Many studies have been carried out as to what makes the project successful or a failure. Below are some of the success factors and some of the failure factors.
Success Factors
User involvement
When the user is involved from the beginning of the project the project team will be getting input from the people who are going to be most affected by the system that is being