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Revive That Derailed Development Project

By Esther Shein

When IT consultant Mike Benz's phone rings, it's often a client struggling with a software development project gone bad. Recently, for example, a retailer called the certified project management professional (PMP) in Minneapolis, Minn., in a panic: They needed to change their computer software, hardware and their business practices in order to comply with new credit card security standards put forth by the Payment Card Industry (PCI). Having let other projects take priority, they ran into trouble just when they ran out of time.

Application development project failures are ubiquitous; very few organizations don't have a sad story to tell, and often for the same reasons: too- tight deadlines with too-few resources; too much time spent on minutia; and, perhaps most importantly, solid project management practices have not been established.

You don't have to join the "woe is me" chorus. When implementing a development project, forewarned is forearmed.

Getting Better All the Time
Although application implementations are fraught with failure, in fact, the news isn't all bad, emphasizes Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group, a technology research company based in Boston, Mass., that tracks projects and publishes software, "Chaos Report," every two years.

According to the 1998 report, a whopping 28 percent of all software projects worldwide failed or were not used. The number dropped to 23 percent in 2000 and then further decreased to 15 percent in 2002. Johnson attributes the decline between 2000 and 2002 to the fact that spending on Y2K projects slashed (article continues)

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