Software Project Failure Essay

The period of the project is one of the most reason that directly affects to the result. Some parts of the project need a plenty of time to expertise and complete. For example, the calculations of the project need to send to the manager of the project as well as costing a lot of time for adjustments and approval. Normally, this project need more than 6 months to complete the designs and 6 months for the installations.

Three factors define the success of any project; these are time, cost, and quality (Wysocki and RK 2013: 4). This paper identifies three main facets of project management that were inappropriately implemented, namely; Resourcing, Stakeholder Management, and Risk Management and how their improper implementation led to the violation of the three constraints (i.e. time, cost, and quality).

Top to Down: When given the total time by project manager, higher level managers tend to squeeze the time to reduce the time and cost. Therefore, lower level manager has to give up the initial schedule to satisfy higher level managers. The finalized time depends on the complexity of the organization: the more layers, the less time to complete a project.

Running head: HOW TO NOT DO A PROJECT- THE SEVEN CLASSIC MISTAKES How to not do a Project The Seven Classic Mistakes Menaka Katapadi Kamath The University of Texas at Dallas Author Note Menaka Katapadi Kamath, Naveen Jindal School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas Menaka Katapadi Kamath is now at Naveen Jindal School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080. Correspondence concerning this journal should be addressed to Menaka Katapadi Kamath, 7760 McCallum Blvd Apt 18104, Dallas, TX 75252. contact: mxk165230@utdallas.edu Abstract This assessment summarizes the failures and classic mistakes that occur during the life cycle of a project and best practices to prevent and overcome mistakes. Every project basically centers around mistakes that are either people or process related. Seldom are the chances that mistakes have anything to do with technology or the product itself. There are seven classic mistakes that are found to occur very commonly in nearly one third of projects. They include poor estimation and scheduling, ineffective management of stakeholders, insufficient management of risks, planning insufficiently, giving less importance to quality assurance, weak work force issues and insufficient sponsorship of project. Proactively identifying problems and taking corrective measures to alleviate the hiccups can prove to be very helpful in handling these mistakes prematurely. How to not do a project The Seven classic mistakes Every

The cold hard truth is that projects always look better on paper; this is because in the development phase they are still lacking the human element. When projects are actually implemented you have to consider laziness, incompetence, and level of knowledge. In short you have to account for human error. There are systems glitches that can be unexpected as well. Just as with people, software does not always perform up to expectations. Files can get corrupted and will not run as planned. You can never plan for everything but through risk management you can help to mitigate the impact.

Though speeding the process is not always an option, it can aid in finding problems sooner and avoiding time delays later. "Another reason for reducing project time occurs when unforeseen delays—for example, adverse weather, design flaws, and equipment breakdown—cause substantial delays midway in the project. Getting back on schedule usually requires compressing the time on some of the remaining critical activities. The additional costs of getting back on schedule need to be compared with the costs of being late (Gray and Larson, 2003)."

Project management provides reasonable scientific solutions in order to overcome difficulties and achieve success. Each project has a variety of objectives have to achieve, these objectives are vary and can be for organization objectives or for social objectives. However, the project objectives could face some obstacles could be lead to limited success. The attempt to discover the factors of project success and project failure was not easy task for both scholars and expertise. These definitions can provide a close understanding and explanation for these terms. Many project management literatures have variety definitions of project success. (Adinyira, 2012) pointed out that Pinto and Slevin (1988) defined the success as delivering projects on proper time, cost and quality. Others like westerveld, elizabith have different ideas regarding the success that are related to the judge of stakeholders and organizational management. However, nowadays success become more complex issue to determine, it is not only meeting the costs and time it is belonging to the typology and sector of the project

Why don't information systems projects work out as planned? What causes the differences between the plan and reality?

Performance reviews are intended to encourage changes in behavior, encourage career development, and support continuous organizational learning. These reviews focus on social and technical contributions the individual contributed to the project team. For example, the 360-degree feedback process has been used successfully to improve the ability of people to work on teams. As long as performance reviews are not directly related to pay and promotion decisions, such reviews are more readily accepted and even perceived as positive for the individual and organization.Since pay reviews can result in negative or positive outcomes for a career, they are perceived as very serious by most individuals. Pay reviews should be more carefully structured and based on clear standards and criteria known to the person being evaluated. Every attempt should be made to avoid confrontation. 4. Advocates of retrospective methodology claim there are distinguishing characteristics that increase its value over past lessons learned methods. What are they? How does each characteristic enhance project closure and review? * Uses an independent facilitator. The facilitator is held responsible for identifying and implementing lessons learned. Independence encourages gaining more information from stakeholders. * Includes a minimum of three in-process learning gates during the life project cycle. These gates catch problems and success

In “Response of IT Project Management: Infamous Failures, Classic Mistakes, and Best Practices”, R.Ryan Nelson (2007) argued that the best way to avoid classical mistakes and finally stay away from infamous failure is to use best practices proactively and knowledgeably. He also suggested that project managers focus on people and process, institute their own best practices, and improve best practices by identifying the problems most occurs in specific project and using the matrix.

There are many causes of project failure and every failed project will have its own set of issues. Sometimes it is a single trigger event that leads to failure, but more often than not, it is a complex entwined set of problems that combine and cumulatively result in failure. In case of Avon, though implementation of SMT model was a the next logic step which would give a tremendous boost to its direct marketing structure, there were some pretty drastic errors made which led to catastrophic failure of the project. The prime causes of failure in case of Avon were:

thought in this area being: how success is judged and the factors that contribute to the

Another reason is prototyping requires a significant amount of the users or customers’ time to use the prototype and provide feedback about the system especially when the developer develops a prototype that is too complex. The users may be stuck in debates over the details of the prototype due to its complexity which may halt the development team progress and thus, delaying the final product. This situation might incur more time and costs which affects their profitability. There are also certain users that thought the prototype as the finished or final system. They think that a prototype which is intended to be thrown away is actually a final system that merely needs to be finished or polished. They are often unaware of the effort needed by the developers to conduct error-checking and add security features which a prototype may not have. This can lead them to expect the prototype to accurately model the performance of the final system when this is not the intention of the developers. Users can also become attached to features that were included in a prototype for consideration and then removed from the specification for a final system. If the users think that all proposed features are to be

First and foremost, Ian Linton stated that, development teams that work on new products or improving the existing ones should take account of customer needs by reviewing market research or customer feedback. However, teams dominated by technologists or engineers may focus on product features that are attractive or interesting to them but not necessarily important to customers. The result is likely to be a product that may lead competitors in terms of features and performance but has little appeal to the market. The revenue from the new product is therefore unlikely to cover the costs of development, making it a poor

Proper following and acknowledgement of the timeline is vital to the success of this project. If the project goes overtime, it can cause serious budget mess-ups and furthermore delays.