A recent study in software project failure between 1998 and 2005 doesn’t make for pretty reading with the cost of project failure across the European Union estimated at €142 billion in 2004.

The research looked at over 200 projects of various sizes in a variety of sectors.

Although the text and tabular data doesn’t match up (unless I misunderstood it) it looks like none of the projects were cancelled after an initial feasibility study. This 100% success rate strikes me as a little fishy and I wonder if some of the projects that got through this stage were actually a bit ‘iffy’ in the first place? The statement that “ leadership, stakeholder and risk management issues are not factored into projects early on and in many instances cannot formally be written down for political reasons“ suggests to me that projects were pushed through in some cases despite people warning against them.

The top three failure issues identified were:

• Lack of Business Process alignment (i.e. it didn’t do what the business needed)
• Requirements Management (i.e. nobody knew what the business needed)
• Overspends (i.e. they spent a lot of money trying to find out what the business needed but they had to build something while this was happening and predictably ended up building something the business didn’t need.)

The authors call for more project methodology as the way to address this although this seems to me to be more of the same approach that contributed to the problem in the first place.