The Standish Group?

[Lars Hallin]

Hi All,

I am planning to embark a MSP crusade to increase the use of the tool at my
company, and I am looking for ammunition. One thing I want to do is to show
the rate of failure among IT projects and from here navigate to the use of a
tool to control the projects better. When surging the web I often run into
something called the Chaos Report issued by the Standish Group.

My question is: how good is this reference? I have not heard of them before.
Is there any other source out there that you would recommend?

Cheers
Lars

 

[Jack Dahlgren]

It is a bit old. People were quoting from that report almost a decade ago.
I think that you should be careful about falling into the trap that just
using a new tool will help your business. Tools are only useful as part of a
process. Fix the process first or you are likely to end up as one of the
statistics in a future report on failure.

-Jack Dahlgren

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Lars --

In addition to Jack's sage advice to fix the process, I noted on the
Standish Group web site (http://www.standishgroup.com) that they have just
released their 2007 Chaos research results. Of course, the data is not
free.

To piggyback on Jack's sage advice, using a desktop applicaton such as
Microsoft Project, or an enterprise application such as Project Server, will
not solve your project management process problems. In fact, either tool
will only magnify the problems, especially when using Project Server because
it impacts everyone involved in your project management environment. One
way to take advantage of this problem is to use the tool to IDENTIFY
problems with your project management methodologies and processes, and then
use this information to FIX the problems. Just an additional thought. Hope
this helps.

 

[Vazabe]

Hello,

Try this link for other reports:

http://www.it-cortex.com/Stat_Failure_Rate.htm

Also search for the KPMG report.

Provide them with a simple tool, or else they will not use it.

 

[Rod Gill]

Rather than sell using the tool, sell what good schedules and how much
better and easier it is to use Project to create and manage schedules. For
phase two look to automate weekly reports as much as possible using
information from Project schedules for even better buy-in.

--

Rod Gill
Project MVP

NEW!! Project VBA Book, for details visit: http://www.projectvbabook.com