95% of I/T Projects Are Late

This comes as no shock to anyone who has been on an I/T (Information Technology - the programmers and computer geeks) project. The vast majority of them appear to be delivered late. Thus, 95% of CEOs are unhappy with the on-time delivery of their I/T shops. Why the poor on-time record?

Info-Tech asserts that the top three "perceived" reasons for project failures include unrealistic time frames, staff shortages and poorly defined project scopes — results that would make most IT consultants positively giddy, given that two of the three are practically open invitations for their services. These may be contributing factors, but in my experience the bottom line is simply that failures sometimes occur and people, even highly skilled IT workers, occasionally make mistakes. IT departments can't always anticipate what will go wrong and they don't usually know when they're embarking on a doomed project.

This matches my experience. Executives always want realistic estimates cut severely. They always want a project using the latest untested technology. And they always want it to work without bugs the very first time, but without the time taken to properly test and Q/A the product. Such is life. But until Executives understand that software requires the same timeframes and methodologies as hardware, such dissatisfaction is inevitable.