Why Do So Many Software Development Projects Fail?

Although the world depends on software to run nearly everything these days, most software development projects either fail completely or deliver only a fraction of the value intended. Why is this?

Broadly speaking, there are two major kinds of software project: off-the-shelf large systems implementation, and custom development. In this article we’ll be looking at the latter, and I’ll cover the former in another article in the near future.

First let’s provide a little background: I’ve been in the hi-tech arena for nearly thirty-five years and in that time I’ve co-founded several startups, worked for a large software company, implemented a wide range of operational systems for various organizations, and have worked on software development and remediation projects for a wide range of multinational clients. As a result of all this experience I’ve learned a few things about why projects fail and I’m going to do my best to impart some of this knowledge in this article in the hope that it may help a few people to avoid some obvious pitfalls in their own software development projects.

One of the most common mistakes is for people to have an idea in mind and then fail to take outside…