ITC493 Assignment 1 Task 2 Chapter 1

Q1: Visit the Standish Group's Web site at http://www.standishgroup.com/. Read one of the CHAOS articles or a similar report on information technology project management on their site or a similar site. Write a one-page summary of the report, its key conclusions, and your opinion of the report. (Chapter 1, Exercise 1, page 34)

A:
The CHAOS Report (1994) is an article about failure factor and success factor of information technology project.

In this article, at first, software development is compared with bridge building. The failure of software development is more than bridge building’s. One of the biggest reasons is the design of a bridge is more certain than software’s. When a bridge’s design and contract have been confirmed, they normally won’t be changed. But it seems impossible for IT projects. Nowadays, the business environment is ever changing. It is difficult to keep the requirement of a project unchangeable. Just this uncertainty makes many information technology projects fail. Unfortunately, not like bridge building, many computer companies don’t learn lessons from the failure. Therefore we still make the same mistakes again and again.

Secondly, this article provides some statistics about failures of projects. In 1994, about $250 billion were spent on 175,000 IT projects in the United States. The average only 16.2% of these projects were completed on-time and on-budget. Almost 31.1% of projects were canceled before they ever got completed. Almost 52.7% of projects cost 189% of their original budget. Even in those completed projects, a good few didn’t match the original specification requirements. And quite a few projects got delayed. Large companies’ situations are worse than medium companies’ and small companies’. The main reason of cost and time overruns is restart. Almost 94% of projects will restart and not only once.

Thirdly, this article discusses success and failure reasons of IT projects. The three major success reasons are user involvement, executive management support, and a clear statement of requirements. The top two failure causes are incomplete requirements and lack of user involvement. For further insight into failure and success, The Standish Group focused on four groups with IT executives of major companies- California DMV, American Airlines, Hyatt Hotels, and Banco Itamarati. Because of incomplete statement of requirements, lack of user involvement, and poor requirements and specifications, the former two companies’ projects failed. Whereas, the latter two companies, they had user involvement, a clear statement of requirements, executive management support, and proper planning, therefore their projects succeed.

At last, The Standish Group indicates that if deliver software components early and often in smaller time frames, it will increase the success rate. Shorter time frames bring on a repeated process of design, prototype develops, test, and deploy small elements. This process is known as “growing” software. It will make users earlier engaged, every component has its own owner, and expectations are realistically set. Every component has clear and accurate statements and aims. This could make projects simpler, and reduce confusion and cost.

In conclusion, I think, with the project is bigger, the difficulty of its management is bigger. So this is why the situation of large company is worse than medium company and small company. To make one project success, we should let the user join our development team. It means we should survey the sponsor, the user, everyone who will use this system. Let them tell us what they really want, what they really need. Only after that, we could write a clear and accurate system requirement. It is very important to make a clear and accurate requirement for project. It will influence this project whether will be restarted and succeed. Spending some time on this will reduce the project’s time in future. And we should all along keep touch with the user, if they need change, we could make responses immediately. At the same time, we could get their technology supports and feedback as well. Project managers should make a proper planning. It means they should assort with scope, time, and cost. Then mangers make a good schedule which will insure the project succeeds. Project managers should know how to decompose a large, complex, difficult system into small, simple, easy sub-systems. Making difficult problem easy will improve project success rate.

Reference
The CHAOS Report (1994), Standish Group, http://www.standishgroup.com/sample_research/chaos_1994_1.php, 8/22/07