Tutorial: Why do we need methods?

2.    The author also quotes the Standish Report stating “the statistics demonstrate that the larger the budget and the bigger the team, the more likely the project is to fail. Nine out of ten large projects experience severe problems. With regard to software development projects, bigger is almost never better”.

 Why do you think that large projects with big budgets are more likely to fail?

Answer (XUAN TRUONG)

Large projects with big budgets are more likely to fail because of many reasons . Compare computer industry to other industry like bridge building . As you know all of the bridge building projects are large and in computer industry there are many large projects too . According the chaos report , bridges are normally built on time , on budget and do not fall down while software never comes on time , on budget and it always break down . If a bridge fall down , it's investigated and a report is written on cause of the failure . This is not so in the computer industry where failures are cover ignored, and as a result, we keep making the same mistakes over and over again .

Many report show that large project means the project is very complexity . Very complexity make more uncertainties . More Uncertainties make project is harder to estimate . Hard to estimate make low estimates . Low estimates lead cost overruns . And even if a large project has been launch, it still can be failure . Here is examples : 

Picture 1

Here is a illustrates the distribution of success and failure across project size : 

Picture 2

The large project fail much more than small and medium project . Why ? According the Gartner Survey , to know it we based on 6  causes of project failure :

1. Functionality issues
2. Substantially late
3. Quality issues
4. High cost variance
5. Canceled after launch
6. Rejected or not implemented for other reasons

Based on these causes we have illustrates the percentage of failures : 

Picture 3 

As we see , in functionality issues , the percentage of three project size is almost equivalent as other reason issues . In substantially late , large IT projects is higher than the other project because is large project , it take much more time to done and business conditions keep changing after the project scope has been set and it make the project time overruns . About high cost variance you can review picture 2 to for more examples . Poor quality of large IT projects is lower because large project cant develop with poor quality if u want it success . In canceled after launch , the percentage is lower because you can't launch a large project with many issues with function or time overruns especially the cost overruns . If large project fail , it fail during development.

The last problem is with big team , the large project still more likely to fail . Let take a look at an examples : In a develop team have 10 person , it's easy to see which developer needs help . In a team have 50 person , it's hard to see who needs help . In a team have 100 person , it's even harder . Even they memos their problems , u don't have enough time to help each person and it will cause your project time and cost overruns. So why don't we hired a small develop team to develop large project ? We don't do that because this may cause the developer have less responsibility with their work . One person have many work to do so they just finish their function or statement then work with the next function or statement with low quality even without testing . So that make project fail too.