Many of my experienced readership will think they know the answer to this question from a personal “coal face” perspective and not realise that the best practice answer to this question could be at variance to their own view. It has never failed to surprise me over the years how many managers I have come across who think they know the answer, but when questioned singularly fail to give a response even close to the correct answer.
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What is this?
This is a tool enable you to track historical earned value statistics and is used to forecast future project performance. This tool takes the heat out of preparing EVA statistics within MSProject.
Really simple to use !
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It’s a Disaster
A good starting point for answering this question is the CHAOS (US) survey compiled by the Standish group, where it was noted from a significant sample set, that 70% to 91% of IT projects /programmes of work were judged as failures each year, with 40% of these cancelled prior to delivery.
Obviously, a project cancelled prior to delivery is surely in anyone’s books a failure. The criteria used to judge the rest as failures were based on whether the projects delivered systems which materially fell short in terms of required functionality, or significantly overshot targeted Time, Quality and Cost coordinates. In a previous post entitled – “Truth about IT Project Failure - How Big is the Problem” I cover this subject in more detail for those interested.
So what is IT Project /Programme Failure Costing The Nation ?
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Whilst preparing for a presentation titled the same name as this post, I came across a number of surprising statistics which I thought I would share.
The first was the discovery that in the UK we apparently invest something in the region of £100 billion per/annum on change related projects /programmes of work, but the returns earned by industry on the back of such a huge levels of investment are in fact negative.
That’s right industry as a whole loses on change related investments!
The exact figures concerning these negative returns run as follows:-
“Based on GDP the yield is about -6% “
“Based on Shareholder Value over 10 years the return – 4%”
These figures are quite astonishing.
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So what is an Inter Project Dependency (IPD)?
It is where Projects become so intertwined that one portion of one project cannot begin or be continued unless a part of another project has been completed.
Alternatively, it can be described as the relationship between a key event in a Controlling project and another key event in a Dependent project.
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