Sunday, 15 November 2009 00:00

Project Failure Bunk

Rate this item

(4 votes)

Are project success rates getting better or worse? What is the cost? What are the controlling factors? How does someone calculate these numbers? The answers are elusive. Lately, Roger Sessions has taken exception to one source—The Standish Group. He has many valid points. However, I doubt there are any statistics giving us a complete picture.

This twitter banter prompted me to dust off some old reports, dig through my library and search my online files to pull some meaningful data together. I was wondering about the headline sentence of this year's Standish Chaos Report, which contains "[2008's] results show a decrease in project success rates, with 32% of all projects succeeding." A pretty alarming statement.

What Does the Standish Data Show?

Figure 1 - Standish Project Success Data

As it turned out, I needed only two sources of data from Standish—The 2009 Chaos Report and the book My Life is Failure. I plotted the combined data of Cancelled, Challenged and Successful project to get a picture of the changes since the famed report was first published in 1994. Figure 1 shows a graph of this data.

There is some very good news here. The Success line is trending up quite nicely. It has had a few setbacks, but it is improving. It starts at about 20% Success in 1994 going to the mid-thirties in 2008. In fact, it looks relatively linear (flattening a little in the last few years).

Graph to compare Cancelled to Challenged

Figure 2 - Comparison of Cancelled
and Challenged Projects

The bad sign is on Cancelled projects. They appear to be trending up over the last three years. However, a closer look shows the Challenged curve seems to be a mirror image of Cancelled curve. Plotting the Challenged to Not Cancelled (100%-Cancelled) percentages (Figure 2) confirms the strong correlation hinted in the previous graph.

Is this simply that people are realizing that they should stop throwing good money at bad projects and cancelling them sooner? Is the improvement in success rates because companies are running more smaller, less complex projects? Both would show good fiscal responsibility. Unfortunately, Standish does not publish that data, at least in the material I have. With this, we are back to Mr. Sessions' complaint with the Standish Group's data. In addition, the headline above, that the numbers are getting worse, does not reflect the whole picture. The trend appears to be an overall improvement in handling projects. Standish has trouble saying that since they live off of failure.

The question remains, "Are Standish's numbers valid?" But, does it matter? As long as they are consistent in the way they collect data, trends should be valid. Changing the method may move an entire line up or down, but it is unlikely to change the trends.

Figure 3 - PMI's Membership
Count Since 1964

Where is the Improvement Coming From?

Curiosity abounds. What is causing the increased project Success? I looked in the obvious place for comments on project improvement—the Project Management Institute (PMI). There is a variety of data to choose from on their website; I chose what could be easily referenced—the 2008 Annual Report. This report indicates the ranks of PMI have grown from 10,000 members in 1994 to 287,438 at the end of 2008. As they point out in their report "That's literally exponential growth." This is evident from Figure 3 (2008 Annual Report, page 5). One might expect this explosion in the number of professionals to spur an equal improvement in the project success numbers. If this were a factor, the improvement surely would look nonlinear. However, this exponential growth in the PMI numbers seems to have had little effect on the linear improvement in project success.

I guess I am going to have to continue to dig to see why there is an improvement in the success rate. Keep checking back.

Read 18283 times

Tagged under

Related items

People vs Process Track Session/Keynote Example

<p>Sorry, your browser cannot display frames!</p>

If you want educational keynote many of our presentations can be keynotes or track sessions. In the example below, the presentation People or Process: Which Impacts Project Success More? is given as a track session.

Example People vs Process keynote as a track session

This session was given at the PMI Sioux Empire Professions Development Day help in Sioux Falls SD on September 9, 2014.
Transform Your Project Leadership: For Professionals Leading Projects or Company Initiatives
Todd Williams contributed Chapter 7, "Leaders Listen." You can buy it on Amazon.

More coming soon!
Filling Execution Gaps: How Executives and Project Managers Turn Corporate Strategy into Successful Projects

What Filling Execution Gaps Covers

Filling Execution Gaps

by Todd C. Williams
ISBN: 978-1-5015-0640-6
De G Press (DeGruyter), September 2017

Project alignment, executive sponsorship, change management, governance, leadership, and common understanding. These six business issues are topics of daily discussions between executives, middle management, and project managers; they are the pivotal problems plaguing transformational leadership. Any one of these six, when improperly addressed, will hex a project's chances for success. And, they do—daily—destroying the ability companies to turn vision into value.

Check it out on Amazon or the Filling Execution Gaps website

Without the foundation of a common understanding of goals and core concepts, such as value being critical to success, communication stops and projects fail.

Without change management, users fail to adopt project deliverables, value is lost, and projects fail.

Without maintaining alignment between corporate goals and projects, projects miss their value targets and projects fail.

Without an engaged executive sponsor, scope increases, goals drift, chaos reigns, value is lost, and projects fail.

Without enough governance, critical connections are not made, steps are ignored, value is overlooked, and projects fail.

Too much governance slows progress, companies cannot respond to business pressures, value drowns in bureaucracy, and projects fail.

Without strong leadership defining the vision and value, goals are not set, essential relationships do not form, teams do not develop, essential decisions are not made, and projects fail.
Filling Execution Gaps: Building Success-Focused Organizations

Executives define vision, strategy, and goals to advance the business. Projects enable companies to meet those goals. Between strategy and projects, there is a lot of work to be done—work that lays the foundation for project and operational success. Through experience and research, six common gaps exist in organizations that inhibit project success—an absence of common understanding, disengaged executive sponsors, misalignment with goals, poor change management, ineffective governance, and lackluster leadership.
Get Recognized as a Leader: Four Core Leadership Actions

Leaders make decisions. This requires a core set of actions to gather the best information, hear out the concerns of others, and making a decision that everyone will follow—even if there is not unanimous agreement with the decision. Although there are hundreds of actions leaders must take, there are four core actions that all great leaders do—listening, dialog and discussion, selling a vision, and eliminating blame. This session will discuss those actions in a roundtable format that we call a "What Would You Do?" session. In these sessions, the presenter acts as a moderator spending 10 to 15 minutes per topic working with the audience talking about what the action is, how to best do it, and hearing from the group on how they have carried out the action. This brings significant audience interaction, involvement, and broader education.