What Are The Chances for IT Project Success?

So I was teaching a class in Enterprise Architecture and IT Governance this week.

In one of the class exercises, one of the students presented something like this bell-shaped distribution curve in explaining a business case for an IT Project.

The student took a nice business approach and utilized a bell-shaped curve distribution to explain to his executives the pros and cons of a project.

Basically, depending on the projects success, the middle (1–2 standard deviations, between 68–95% chance), the project will yield a moderate level of efficiencies and cost-savings or not.

Beyond that:

- To the left are the downside risks for significant losses — project failure, creating dysfunction, increased costs, and operational risks to the mission/business.

- To the right is the upside potential for big gains — innovations, major process reengineering, automation gains, and competitive advantages.

This curve is probably a fairly accurate representation based on the high IT project failure rate in most organizations (whether they want to admit it or not).

I believe that with:

- More user-centric enterprise architecture planning on the front-end

- Better IT governance throughout

- Agile development and scrum management in execution

that we can achieve ever higher project success rates along the big upside potential that comes with it!

We still have a way to go to improve, but the bell-curve helps explains what organizations are most of the time getting from their investments. ;-)

(Source Graphic: Adapted by Andy Blumenthal from here)