Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 12
This Month's Issue:
Consolidation is Key
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Project Management 2.0:
Collaborative Communications

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By Barbara Lancaster and Wedge Greene

Projects Gone Bad

According to the Standish Group, great strides have been made in delivering successful projects (defined as those that meet their time, budget and scope expectations). Since their seminal study of the success of IT projects – the 1994 Chaos Report– the rate of successful projects has doubled! Tempering this great news is the sobering fact that the success number used to be about 16% and we’ve now made it all the way up to 35%.

Similarly, projects that are judged as partial successes are now nudging 50%, up from the 34% reported fourteen years ago. Projects deemed total failures improved from a dismal 31% in 1996 to 19% in 2006. While this is undoubtedly progress, it is very worrisome that the 2006 results are almost identical to those reported by the same group in 2003. The industry managed to make significant improvement between 1994 and 2003, but seems to have stalled since then.

Furthermore, time over runs have increased, up from 63% in the year 2000, to 82% in 2006. Slashing functionality to get closer to the schedule and budget unfortunately is also gaining in popularity, with only 52% of the required features and functions making it to production in 2006, compared to 67% in the year 2000.

All of this means that some $145 billion is still spent annually on IT projects that fail to deliver the expected (and required) benefits. Real money at real risk, and in tight economic times, this cannot be perceived by anyone as a good thing.

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If there is a killer application in the Internet age, it is facilitated communications. This is at the core of the Web 2.0 World (W2W). The Web 2.0 revolution is all about empowering communication. Many new technical approaches combine to facilitate this. We can



All of this means that some $145 billion is still spent annually on IT projects that fail to deliver the expected (and required) benefits. Real money at real risk, and in tight economic times, this cannot be perceived by anyone as a good thing.

Can we do better?

What can we do to accelerate the pace of improvement? How can we ensure more repeatable success? We need to do more to solve the continuing project killer: poor communications.


use some of it to improve “worker to worker” interaction and communication. Furthermore, we can improve on the “big picture”; gaining a fuller understanding of what is occurring. And we can monitor both management and workers to see what is happening and how their contributions fit together to move the project forward, and where nudging, prodding, or more serious escalation is required to get everyone back on track.

Two other factors figure largely in analyzing the differences between successful projects and the not-so-successful:

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