IT projects remain beset by leadership problems

Dr John McManus, senior research fellow, University of Lincoln

According to research I conducted last year with a colleague, the annual cost of IT project failure across the European Union is a breathtaking €142bn (£125bn).

To put that figure in context, we defined project failure as any project not meeting any or all of the following success criteria: cost, time, quality and original requirements.

The study looked at 214 projects between 1998 and 2005. Of those we examined, seven out of eight projects were classified as failures. Amid the current economic turmoil, such levels of project failure are cause for alarm.

There was little comfort we could draw from the research. The firms we studied had adopted sophisticated project management techniques to steer and keep projects on track. Yet many still failed.

Strong executive leadership and project management skills are lacking in many firms. Indeed, the major causes of project failure relate to inadequate leadership and pre-project due diligence.

Evidence suggests that the culture within many companies is often such 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 and are rarely discussed openly at project board or steering group meetings, although they may be discussed at length behind closed doors.

Despite attempts to make software development and project delivery more rigorous, a considerable proportion of effort results in systems that do not meet user expectations and are cancelled. In our view, this is attributed to the fact that very few businesses have the infrastructure, education, training, or management discipline to bring projects to successful completion.

While our understanding of the importance of project failure has increased, the underlying reasons still remain an issue and a point of contention for practitioners and academics. There is still a lot to learn from studying project failure.