An interesting piece from the BCS on IT project overruns analysing where, how badly and why projects go wrong - and a quick analysis of the projects that were reviewed (over 200 in total) showed that around a third of the IT projects ran over time and/or budget.
This led to project cancellation of 1/4 IT projects mainly due to one of three causes - poor Business Process Alignment, poor requirements identification (laid mainly at the door of using the wrong people to do the requirements analysis) or the project was so overspent that the business case no longer stacked up.
Looking at the overruns on the 1/3 projects that overran - 1/2 of those overran by up to a year and £2m - the other 1/2 overran by up to 2 years and £4m.
So...if you use the right experienced people to do your analysis - and you document and manage your requirements well you're on the right track - but once the project goes off track you could be asking for a lot of money from your steering group!
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