Project Failure Prevention: 10 Principles for Project Control

[martinig]

The Methods & Tools newsletter has just released in its html archive
section the article "Project Failure Prevention: 10 Principles for
Project Control". It is now well-known and well-documented that far
too many projects fail totally or partially, both in engineering
generally and software engineering. Everybody has some opinions about
this. This paper offers some of Tom Gilb's opinions and originality to
the discussion. The basic premises in this paper are as follows:
* We specify our requirements unclearly;
* We do not focus enough on ensuring that the system design meets the
requirements.

http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=56

 

[davegb]

The Methods & Tools newsletter has just released in its html archive
section the article "Project Failure Prevention: 10 Principles for
Project Control". It is now well-known and well-documented that far
too many projects fail totally or partially, both in engineering
generally and software engineering. Everybody has some opinions about
this. This paper offers some of Tom Gilb's opinions and originality to
the discussion. The basic premises in this paper are as follows:
* We specify our requirements unclearly;
* We do not focus enough on ensuring that the system design meets the
requirements.

http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=56

Thanks for posting that! Looks interesting, am looking forward to
reading it.
Curious as to your read on a theory of mine on project failure. I
believe that 90% of projects that fail fail before they're 10%
complete. A parallel to Pareto's Law in Quality Management. Meaning
that about 90% of projects that fail, the seeds of the failure were
there from early on. The failure might not be obvious until much
later. Examples might be poor scope/requirements definition, poor
quality management, etc. Things that are built in from the beginning.
These kinds of failures are far more common, in my more than 30 years
of experience, than major catastrophes occuring later in the project.

Looking briefly at your list, it seems to me that most, if not all,
occur early on (the word "early" appears frequently in Gilb's list) in
the project, which seems to validate my theory. Any ideas on the
subject?