IT Project Failures

According to M Bronte-Stewart, IT projects have a bad reputation for going over budget and schedule, not ..... expectations and for providing poor return on investment (Clegg et al, 1997; Keil et al, 1998; Fielding, 2002; The Register, 2002; Jaques, 2004).

Planning and organising projects, selecting suitable software and hardware, and designing effective websites are important business decisions, yet firms often do not take adequate precautions or advice before making ..... of faith, spending large sums of money on inappropriate, unwanted or badly implemented IT systems.

Many large IT systems contracts are in dispute or have been suspended: a project to replace the British Army, Navy and Air Force inventory systems with a single system was ..... to a halt after 130m had been spent.

The more IT projects are seen to go wrong, the more the public learns to expect problems and delays, the more developers may think that much of their work is likely to be a waste of effort, and the more those holding the ..... strings may view any IT project as a worry and probably a poor return on investment.

IT staff can become ....., lose goodwill and fail to accept or follow the advice of managers: for all these reasons we should be looking for ways to reduce the incidence and effects of failure.

The OASIG (1996), a DTI-supported special interest group concerned with the organisational aspects of IT, interviewed a group of leading researchers and consultants who between them had over 900 years of professional work in the field, and were ..... on the experiences of over 14,000 organisations.

The report to the UK's Economic and Social Research Council published the following ..... findings on the eventual outcomes of IT projects: 80% to 90% do not meet their goals, 80% are delivered late and over budget, and 40% fail or are abandoned.

The report went on to suggest some of the main reasons why IT projects seem to fail; one is that the Management agenda is too limited in that most IT investments are technology ..... and the main investment motive is only to cut costs.

It is alarming that significant numbers of IT projects still fail to deliver benefits on time, within budget and ..... expectations; a great deal of the 24 billion or so being spent on IT each year in the UK (BCS 2004) is being wasted.

One way to improve this situation is to carry out a risk estimation exercise that gives a standardised ....., so that the process can be discussed and focussed on important characteristics; results can be compared and users can build up an expertise of experience in evaluating projects' potential for success.