What percent of projects are late and overbudget?

D

DapperDanH

I frequent this forum quite abit. I hope this question is reasonable for
this forum.

I will be doing a presentation at Project World. I am looking for
supporting statistics on percentage of projects that are late and overbudget.
I have seen 80%, 95% etc. Is there a tried and true source?

Thanks,
Dan
 
D

davegb

I frequent this forum quite abit. I hope this question is reasonable for
this forum.

I will be doing a presentation at Project World. I am looking for
supporting statistics on percentage of projects that are late and overbudget.
I have seen 80%, 95% etc. Is there a tried and true source?

Thanks,
Dan

I've never seen across-the-board numbers on this. I think it varies
widely form industry to industry, location to location, and certainly,
company to company. I've consulted for companies where 100% of projects
were behind schedule (but they were tracking resource hours to tenths!)
and companies where projects rarely slipped. I know the failure rate is
much higher in the software industry than, say, the construction
industry. Other than that, I've never seen the kind of statistics
you're looking for. Let us know here if you find them. I'm curious,
both as to the numbers, and as to where, if anywhere, you find them!
 
J

Jan De Messemaeker

Hi,

For years a research report ("The CHAOS report") by The Standish Group dated
1995 was sort of a standard (it was quoted in about every presentation I've
seen) - it only dealt with IT projects and results were like 16% of the
projects were a success, 53% ended late or over budget and 31% didn't make
it to the end.
More recently a Price Waterhouse Coopers study on Projects in the top
Belgian companies (focussing more on process change projects) talked about
49% projects considered sucessful.

I have never seen a figure anywhere what you seem to have read (80% yes, but
then 80% failures).

HTH
 
M

Mark Byington

I don't have an answer, and I suspect davegb is correct...that you'll only
find statistics based on targeted business disciplines, but one place you
might research is 'The Standish Group'. They do a lot of work, study, and
research in this area.

www.standishgroup.com

Good luck.
 
M

Mike Glen

Hi Dan,

I can't give you figures, but I can suggest you define what is meant by
"success". On time and within budget is not a valid measure. I would be so
bold as to suggest that some 90% of properly planned projects would be on
time and within budget if they were allowed to progress from start to
completion without any interference. The prime reason why projects appear
go astray is because the parameters on which the project was planned, are
changed frequently as the project progresses, without due acceptance of the
subsequent changes to completion date and extra costs. Indeed, in spite of
all the changes to specifications, projects are more often than not unfairly
measured against the originally stated completion date and budget. If only
the PMs could be left alone to get on with the job without change!

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP
 

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