Why Some Projects Succeed and Others Fail

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IT PROJECT SUCCESS: WHY SOME PROJECTS SUCCEED AND OTHERS FAIL INTRODUCTION What is Project success? Sounds an easy enough question to answer and if you ask 10 people I’m sure you will get varying answers as success is relative. How do you plan for success when you don’t know what success is, basically before you even start you have set yourself on the path to succeeding, in failure that is. Baccarini(1999,p.25) explains project success as two headed, on one head is the project management success and on another head is the project product success. Project management success borders on the process of project management in respects to the time, cost and overall quality. As (Pinkerton 2003,p.337) explains time, cost and quality are the three most important dimensions when it comes to the efficiency of the execution of a project while Project Product success borders on the end product of the project and its effects. Both concepts are different but for one to be successfully completed the other has to be successfully completed as well. (Pinkerton 2003, p.344) beautifully summarizes the above in one short sentence and that is that if the venture is not a success then so is the project itself. Basically Project Product Success plus Project Management Success equals Project success. Voila! there you have it, the answer to all Project Success problems. Well not really, it seems easy but beneath each component is a web of processes that have to be completed and principles that have to be adhered to and that is the aim of this essay, the critical review of relevant academic literature to obtain factors that contribute to the successful delivery of an IT project. By analyzing the basics of Project planning to the more complex intricacies of... ... middle of paper ... ...od was by Winston Royce in 1970. According to (Royce W, 1970) the Waterfall method contains the following phases in order, Requirements specification, Design, Construction (implementation or coding) , Integration, Testing and debugging, Installation and finally Maintenance. It follows a flow of events from phase to phase which has said above is firstly the gathering and documentation of requirements, followed by the design stage which leads to the implementation i.e. coding and the unit testing. Once that is done the next stage of development is the testing of the system which then leads to installation and finally delivery and subsequently maintenance. It’s a step by step approach and as the name implies the Waterfall Methodology is as linear as it gets as one stage basically finishes before the proceeding stage can commence. AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT METHOD

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