Project failures, overall, by project size, Agile vs Waterfall and some contributing factors to success (in the opinion of the participants):
Standish Group 2015 Chaos Report - Q&A with Jennifer Lynch
Quoting:
"The 2015 CHAOS Report has recently been released by the Standish Group. The CHAOS Reports have been published every year since 1994 and are a snapshot of the state of the software development industry. This year the report studied 50,000 projects around the world, ranging from tiny enhancements to massive systems re-engineering implementations. This year the report includes an enhanced definition of success looking at some additional factors which were covered in previous surveys.
The results indicate that there is still work to be done around achieving successful outcomes from software development projects. This table summarises the outcomes of projects over the last five years using the new definition of success factors (on time, on budget with a satisfactory result)"
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Listed factors that could help in project success include:
"The definitions for these factors are:
Executive Support: when an executive or group of executives agrees to provide both financial and emotional backing. The executive or executives will encourage and assist in the successful completion of the project.
Emotional maturity is the collection of basic behaviors of how people work together. In any group, organization, or company it is both the sum of their skills and the weakest link that determine the level of emotional maturity.
User Involvement: takes place when users are involved in the project decision-making and information-gathering process. This also includes user feedback, requirements review, basic research, prototyping, and other consensus-building tools.
Optimization is a structured means of improving business effectiveness and optimizing a collection of many small projects or major requirements. Optimization starts with managing scope based on relative business value.
Skilled staff are people who understand both the business and the technology. A skilled staff is highly proficient in the execution of the project’s requirements and deliver of the project or product.
SAME is Standard Architectural Management Environment. The Standish Group defines SAME as a consistent group of integrated practices, services, and products for developing, implementing, and operating software applications.
Agile proficiency means that the agile team and the product owner are skilled in the agile process. Agile proficiency is the difference between good agile outcomes and bad agile outcomes.
Modest execution is having a process with few moving parts, and those parts are automated and streamlined. Modest execution also means using project management tools sparingly and only a very few features.
Project management expertise is the application of knowledge, skills, and techniques to project activities in order to meet or exceed stakeholder expectations and produce value for the organization.
Clear Business Objectives is the understanding of all stakeholders and participants in the business purpose for executing the project. Clear Business Objectives could also mean the project is aligning to the organization’s goals and strategy"
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Success, namely project success is (re)defined as:
"The Standish Group has redefined project success as onTime, onBudget, with a satisfactory result.
Success is hard to define and we had a hard time coming to this conclusion.
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines success as the fact of getting or achieving wealth: respect or fame: the correct or desired result of an attempt; someone or something that is successful: or a person or thing that succeeds.
The Project Management Institute (PMI) has defined success as onTime, onBudget, and onTarget also known as the Triple Constraints and the Iron Triangle. However, we have seen many projects that have met the Triple Constraints and did not return value to the organization or the users and executive sponsor were unsatisfied."
