Jim Johnson, creator of the CHAOS Chronicles on project failure, answers a question outstanding after our August interview: How does he explain the amazing reduction in cost overruns between 1994 and 1998? As it turns out, Standish collected data and planned to publish a CHAOS report in 1996 but held it back due to these unexpected results. Johnson shares what their research revealed happened.
The CHAOS statistics on project failure are frequently cited by those implementing Agile or other organizational process change, so their validity is of importance to the many people who use them. The implication of this question, posed in several other places on the web as well, is that Standish may have adjusted their research methods without revealing the change in their reports. If true, comparisons of some CHAOS data from 1994 and 1998 could be meaningless.
Standish founder Jim Johnson and his colleagues were also concerned by the results they saw between 1994 and 1996, so concerned that the 1996 survey went unpublished while they investigated the source of the unexpected shifts they saw after 1994: project failures grew from 31% to 40% in two years, while cost overruns dropped precipitously from 189% to 142% in 1996.
In this article he shares what their research revealed about shifts in the world of software development in the mid-nineties, which significantly changed the complexion of project planning and execution.
Read the InfoQ article: Standish: Why were Project Failures Up and Cost Overruns Down in 1998?
The CHAOS statistics on project failure are frequently cited by those implementing Agile or other organizational process change, so their validity is of importance to the many people who use them. The implication of this question, posed in several other places on the web as well, is that Standish may have adjusted their research methods without revealing the change in their reports. If true, comparisons of some CHAOS data from 1994 and 1998 could be meaningless.
Standish founder Jim Johnson and his colleagues were also concerned by the results they saw between 1994 and 1996, so concerned that the 1996 survey went unpublished while they investigated the source of the unexpected shifts they saw after 1994: project failures grew from 31% to 40% in two years, while cost overruns dropped precipitously from 189% to 142% in 1996.
In this article he shares what their research revealed about shifts in the world of software development in the mid-nineties, which significantly changed the complexion of project planning and execution.
Read the InfoQ article: Standish: Why were Project Failures Up and Cost Overruns Down in 1998?