IT Project Management: Infamous Failures, Classic Mistakes, and Best Practices
The IT projects are unique and complex, the majority of IT projects fail to meet at least one measure of success. The author of the article “IT Project management: Infamous failures, classic mistakes and best practices “consider some of the common causes of failures and best practices to avoid them. For a project to be successful every project manager must consider the triple constraint scope, cost, time and balance these three competing goals. A number of key factors contribute towards project failures. In this article it cited Steve McConell grouping the factors in four categories as people, process, product and technology. The article ranked top mistakes as poor estimation, ineffective stakeholder management, insufficient risk management, insufficient planning, poor quality, team issues and insufficient project sponsorship. The interesting finding is the mistakes are due to people or process-related, as opposed to product or technology related. The other interesting finding is given the importance given to scope in IT projects but scope creep was not in the top reason for project failure. The article also identifies that one-half of projects fails due to estimation and scheduling, stakeholder management and risk management. In conclusion, the author integrates different areas of failure and analyzed the reasons for failure and has proposed a framework for success.
I believe the poor estimation and scheduling is the major cause of failures in many projects. As project manager the major concern is to collect accurate estimate and develop a schedule to meet the project timeline. In many projects during estimation phase the scope is defined but each stakeholder might have high level tasks defined but not enough detail to provide an accurate time estimate. Any wrong estimation for any process or group would affect the whole project. The article describes the estimation process as iterative refinement and develop estimate-convergence graph which would be a good
I believe the poor estimation and scheduling is the major cause of failures in many projects. As project manager the major concern is to collect accurate estimate and develop a schedule to meet the project timeline. In many projects during estimation phase the scope is defined but each stakeholder might have high level tasks defined but not enough detail to provide an accurate time estimate. Any wrong estimation for any process or group would affect the whole project. The article describes the estimation process as iterative refinement and develop estimate-convergence graph which would be a good