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Ha, I guess I was giving the benefit of the doubt.

Certainly you hear more about the failures, but that be because they get better press. Not sure about any studies, would love to see a link or two if you have them lying around.



probably just my having soaked in the conventional wisdom, looked around quickly found the following http://www.umsl.edu/~sauterv/analysis/6840_f03_papers/frese/

quotes:

At companies that aren’t among the top 25% of technology users, three out of 10 IT projects fail on average.

AND

On average, about 70% of all IT-related projects fail to meet their objectives.” In this case Lewis includes not only projects that were abandoned (failed), but also those that were defectively completed due to cost overruns, time overruns, or did not provide all of the functionality that was originally promised.

The difference between failure in the two quotes is that the first one seems to consider failure as just abandoned completely as being unachievable. Whereas the second also considers failure as not having achieved all goals.

It seems to me that if the project is big and central enough to a company's processes that it might be worth betting against the survival of that company.


The bottom 50% have no idea because they have no consistent objectives.


Thanks for the info!




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