Useful Resources

• My book, Business Leadership for IT Projects is summarised in this PDF.

• Lean Project Management is an article I wrote, describing how "the principles of lean thinking" can be applied to projects, with as radical an impact on projects as they had on manufacturing.

• The Standish Group are the world's #1 source of information on IT project failure and its causes. They now have a database of over 70,000 projects and this PDF is their 2010 report.

• British Computer Society sponsored research into project failure can be found here.

• The Said Business School, part of Oxford University, conducted research into close to 1,500 projects and found that one in six of IT Projects overrun by 200% or more. Here is a link to an article at hbr.org, describing their conclusions.

• The FBI's Virtual Case File project was cancelled with a write-off of $170 million. The Senate report into the failure points the finger of blame squarely at the business leaders, not the IT suppliers.

• The Public Accounts Committee report into NHS Project (Aug2011) contains the sentence "The Department is unable to show what has been achieved for the £2.7 billion spent to date on care records systems."

• Public Accounts Committee re:NHS project (Sep 2013) is a PDF with the latest view on that same NHS project.

• National Audit Office report on Universal Credit (Sept 2013) is a report into another UK government project in trouble. What makes this worth reading, however, is that the problems observed are common to most projects and programmes, and the conclusions are set out in a way designed to help other projects avoid similar pitfalls, not sling mud around. Good job NAO.

• Why do we never believe that we are subject to the statistics on project failure? We are certain that our project will be different. That's know as optimism bias. Neuroscientist Tali Shrot explains why we all think we are better than average drivers,  in her TED Talk

• This link to a Youtube videos that illustrate our innate propensity to jump to conclusions.

• On a similar theme, this Youtube clip, with Derren Brown, demonstrates that we are pattern seekers, often finding patterns where none exist.