What factors lead to software projectfailure?

June Verner
NICTA AlexandriaSydney Australia
june.verner@nicta.com.au
Jennifer Sampson
NICTA AlexandriaSydney Australia
jennifer.sampson@nicta.com.au
Narciso Cerpa
University of TalcaTalcaChile
n.cerpa@utalca.cl.

Abstract -

It has been suggested that there is morethan one reason for a software
development projectto fail. However, most of the literature that
discussesproject failure tends to be rather general, supplyingus with lists of
risk and failure factors, and focusingon the negative business effects of the
failure. Verylittle research has attempted an in-depth investigationof a
number of failed projects to identify exactly whatare the factors behind the
failure. In this research weanalyze data from 70
failed projects. This dataprovides us with practitioners perspectives on
57development and management factors for projectsthey considered were
failures. Our results show thatall projects we investigated suffered from
numerousfailure factors. For a single project the number of such
factors ranges from 5 to 47. While there doesnot appear to be any
overarching set of failure factorswe discovered that all of the projects
suffered frompoor project management. Most projects additionallysuffered
from organizational factors outside
theproject managers control. We conclude withsuggestions for minimizing
the four most commonfailure factors.
Index terms
software project failure, software projectmanagement, failure factors, project
risk I.

INTRODUCTIONMost of the literature that discusses projectfailure is based on a
handful of failed project casestudies, although Charette[4]lists 31 failedprojects
and discusses three of these projects inmore detail. Most of the research
on failed softwareprojects identifies various factors that lead tofailure, but this is
usually done in a rathergeneralized fashion; the reason for the failure of
aspecific project is often glossed over; rather it is theeffect of the failure that is
described in detail, e.g.,the failure of project X resulted in a loss of $350million
dollars and as a consequence the companywent into receivership. Both Charette
[5] andYardley (cited in [6]) agree that there is generallymore than one reason
for the failure of a softwareproject; it is usually a combination of
technical,project management and business decisions, andeach dimension
interacts with the others incomplicated ways. Project managers (PM)
anddevelopment teams must deal with many pressuresfrom project stakeholders
(i.e., upper levelmanagement, marketing, accounting, customers,and users)
during the software developmentprocess. These pressures impact the effort, cost
andquality of the software produced.Project failures affect software
development staff because late projects usually cause developers tosuffer long
hours of unpaid overtime that impactson their personal lives, leading to loss
of motivation, and stress, resulting in high staff turnover and its associated costs
[9]. High staff turnover is itself associated with project failure.Many software
project failure factors have beendescribed in the literature[1]-[17],including:


organizational structure,


unrealistic or unarticulated goals,


software that fails to meet the real businessneeds,


badly defined system requirements, userrequirements and requirements
specification,



the project management process, poor projectmanagement,


software development methodologies, sloppydevelopment practices,


scheduling and project budget,


inaccurate estimates of needed resources,


poor reporting of the project status,


inability to handle project complexity,