Deliver Software Development Projects on Time & Budget

Within IT, software development projects in particular have a tendency to fail more often than others.  What can CIOs and IT directors do to improve their success rate?

Would it surprise you to learn that over 60% of software development projects fail to meet their schedules, 49% run over budget, 41% fail to deliver the expected business value, and 25% of all IT projects are canceled before completion?  Even among the lucky projects that don't get canceled, 47% have higher than expected maintenance costs.

Sure, insufficient up-front analysis and ineffective estimating techniques are responsible for some of the failures, but more often than not stronger planning and management can prevent software development projects from getting out of control.

There's no need to accept failure when a few simple strategies can turn around your software development projects and allow you to keep to the estimated schedule and budget, deliver direct business value and reduce maintenance costs.

I plan to create a series of blog entries over the next few months with strategies, suggestions and process improvements that have been very effective for my company and our clients.  My goal is to share some of the secrets of our success so that others may benefit from our experience.

While there is no single trick that will solve all problems, there are several ways to capitalize on lessons learned and recent technological advancements to dramatically increase your success rate on software development projects.  A few of the upcoming topics are:

• Building superior teams and maintaining their superiority
• Capitalizing on today's technologies, such as open source, mobile computing and the Cloud
• Knowing when to bring in subject matter experts and specialists

Hopefully you'll pick up some valuable tips and ideas from this blog series that will improve your software development project success rate.  Stay tuned!