Managing Software Development Efficiently

Break out of the software development cycle chaos.

October 15, 2001 — CIO — One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over yet expecting a different result. Our own form of IT insanity is that we continue to use software development approaches that are tired, worn out and destined for failure.

You’ve probably heard of "Chaos ’98," the Standish Group study that found that 75 percent of software projects fail because they are late, over budget or poor quality, or all of the above. For projects valued at more than $10 million, the failure statistic becomes 100 percent. The West Yarmouth, Mass.-based Standish Group came up with four conditions that it says will improve the likelihood of project success:

Executive management support and user involvement.
Clear statement of vision, objectives and requirements.
Proper planning, realistic expectations and frequent milestones.
Competent project management and focused staff.

In my experience, CIOs do a pretty good job at getting the right level of executive management support and user involvement. You would love to have more, but most projects have steering committees and a project sponsor fighting the good fight. Fulfillment of the rest of the criteria is spotty. That is why so many CIOs have too many projects going on, many being done the wrong way, many not worth doing at all.

Projects go astray in many ways. Often they are in need of a purpose. One of my clients in my coaching practice walked into a new CIO job and took inventory of the IT projects in progress. The majority lacked well-defined objectives. That’s the response of a team with no clear mandate.

This happens so easily in IT. Your business partners have a great idea, for instance, and want to get moving on it. But you wait too long to respond to their requests because you’re tied up with other work. When the pressure builds, you delegate the project to an already busy director or project manager and hope for the best. That person delegates it in turn to one of her busy analysts, who then works with his business counterparts to read the minds of the senior executives who came up with this brainstorm. To break out of the cycle, my client challenged his direct reports to define the value and objectives of their initiatives. His employees and their senior business partners quickly instigated valuable direction-setting conversations.

Other times the project mandates are clear, but CIOs try to tackle the project by applying a waterfall development approach—a slow, step-by-step process in which no task is begun until the previous one has been completed. You know you’re dealing with a waterfall project when you see a discovery period of three to six months and more than a year elapses before any software is delivered. The Standish Group indicators for projects with a high likelihood of success comprise a six-month duration from start to finish, no more than six people devoted to the project and less than $750,000 funding committed.