IT Project Management: Infamous Failures, Classic Mistakes, and Best Practices

by Ryan Nelson

Companies realize they cannot stay in business if they cannot manage their projects effectively. Yet, most organizations still are either unable or unwilling to perform the one basic activity critical to project management and continuous improvement: learning from mistakes and successes. This book provides a framework for conducting retrospectives—a process of “looking back”—to glean lessons for ongoing and future project success. This systematic approach has evolved through the analysis of hundreds of information technology (IT) projects over the past 15 years. Compiling the findings of this extensive research, the book offers a guide to managers for mapping project momentum, evaluating project success, applying best practices to identify and avoid classic mistakes, performing root cause analysis, and delivering actionable recommendations aimed at helping organizations achieve continuous project success.

123 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 5, 2014

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have not read this book, but the author's earlier (2007) paper of the same title, published in MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 6 No. 2 / June 2007. This review is about the paper, not the book.

Many papers and book sections list, in more or less detail, software development projects that have failed and some of the reasons leading to such failures. These texts are usually written to motivate the study of Systems and Software Engineering. Even though the ten project examples included in this paper are quite old by Software Engineering standards, they are, unfortunately, still pertinent and the monetary loss incurred by those failures is still staggering -each of them reported losses of over $100 million. The best aspect of the paper is the final 10x10 matrix of the ten most frequent classic mistakes (out of 36 classic mistakes reported in the paper) versus ten best practices that can prevent or, at least, reduce their frequency or severity. This matrix is based on a meta-retrospective of 99 IT projects.

Seven years after this paper (2014), Nelson published a book which extends this paper and more recently (2021) a new paper IT Project Management: Lessons Learned from Project Retrospectives 1999–2020. According to the paper's abstract, it includes new material:

Section 3 presents a robust framework for evaluating project success based [on] three process-related criteria (schedule, cost, and product) and three outcome criteria (use, value, and learning). Section 4 defines momentum as it relates specifically to IT projects and discusses how managers can equip themselves with mapping and analysis tools to control the momentum of a project for best results. The focus of Section 5 is on the most cited reason for IT project failure—poor estimation. Using the findings from two research studies, the section provides recommendations to help project managers improve project estimation. In sum, this monograph plots a pathway to success for IT project managers by applying the voluminous findings from the analysis of retrospectives done for 264 IT projects from 1999 to 2020.

The book and the new paper appear to be very interesting, and I hope to access them both in the future to complete this review.