CHAOS: A Recipe for Success

The 10th edition of the annual CHAOS report from The Standish Group, which researches the reasons for IT project failure in the United States, indicates that project success rates have increased to 34 percent of all projects - a 100 percent improvement over the rate reported in 1994.

The primary reason is the projects have gotten a lot smaller. Doing projects with iterative processing as opposed to the waterfall method, which called for all project requirements to be defined up front, is a major step forward.

Project failures have declined to 15 percent of all projects, a vast improvement over the 31-percent failure rate reported in 1994.

Projects meeting the “challenged” description—meaning that they are over time, over budget and/or lacking critical features and requirements— total 51 percent of all projects in the current survey.

Most of the challenged projects in this year’s survey had a cost overrun of under 20 percent of the budget, a threefold improvement over the first 1994 study.

Find the entire report @ http://www.velocitystorm.com/resources/chaos.pdf