Site Objectives

Project Management originated in the construction and heavy engineering industries and has developed in a number of ways over the last two decades. It has increasingly become recognized as an essential competence by those organisations, which need to effect change in order to prosper and survive. Project Management has also been applied across a growing range of business activities including high tech projects, information technology and, more recently, complex business initiatives.

Despite these advances there is huge gap between project failure rates experienced in the engineering and construction industries, and the rates of failure experienced by the IT industries.

Most failure surveys come to the uncomfortable conclusion that annual IT project /programme failure rates are in region of 75% compared to the engineering and construction industry rates of between 10% and 5%.

Much of this difference in relative failure rates can be explained away by the huge differences in project management maturity, in terms of attitudes and approaches between engineering /construction and the newer IT industry’s. Whether we like it or not, IT Project Management has been going through huge “flip flop” gyrations in approach, attitudes and methods every 3 years, based on little more than the word of a consultant and some flimsy industry references claiming to have all the answers to rising costs, high failure rates and poor quality.

This blog has been set-up with the sole purpose of:-

(1) Assessing the true value of differing project management methods and strategies and their ability to consistently deliver IT project successes and, at a corporate level, real efficiency gains in terms of flexibility, cost, quality and maintainability.

(2) Assess the true value of differing IT development methods and strategies in terms of their relative abilities to deliver repeatable project success and improved organisational efficiencies in terms of cost, quality and maintainability.

(3) Developing maturity and commonality in IT project management and development approaches /strategies.

(4) Encourage professionalism within the software industry.

(5) Exposing some of the worst practices in the software industry e.g software license “stiffing”, with the intention of improving the integrity, standards and respect for IT professionals.

Clarety welcomes readers of this blog to contribute comments, posts and ideas in the search for “what works”.

We must all try to promote and be vocal about what cultures, methods, approaches and strategies deliver repeatable IT project and programme success, whilst at the same time calling a halt to the growing inefficiencies within IT departments, without having to resort to the often misguided and fashionable approach of outsourcing your problems.