Eight Causes of Project Failures: UK Government IT Projects
From the POST report on UK Government IT projects, there are some insightful lessons on why projects fail. Now if we could only get the world to bring those into play early. We could avoid many project failures. Note number 6…. not taking the total ownership cost into account. That is why we stress total ownership costs (which many organizations don’t want to worry about until it is too late).
1. Lack of a clear link between the project and the organisation’s key strategic priorities, including agreed measures of success.
2 Lack of clear senior management and ministerial ownership and leadership.
3. Lack of effective engagement with Stakeholders.
4. Lack of skills and proven approach to project management and risk management.
5. Lack of understanding of and contact with the supply industry at senior levels within the organisation.
6. Evaluation of proposals driven by initial price rather than long-term value for money (especially securing the delivery of business benefits).
7. Too little attention to breaking development and implementation into manageable steps.
8. Inadequate resources and skill to deliver the total delivery portfolio.
Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.
Don’t Assume SaaS Is Cheaper
A very enlightening article by Leo King summarized a Gartner study that claims that Software As A Service (SaaS)
According to Gartner:
- SaaS is cheaper for the first two years
- Five year total cost of ownership is cheaper for on-site software due to accounting rules allowing depreciation of capital assets for on-site software
- SaaS is not necessarily quicker to implement.. As least one organization I know struggled for many months trying to get a SaaS CRM solution to provide the functionality of their prior in-house solution.
- There is another factor consideration that Gartner may not have considered…. The monthly or annual cost of software delivered as a service may have a much lower fee due to paying by the month versus paying for the entire system up front.
Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.
Total Cost of Ownership: Development is (only) Job One
Planning software development projects is never an easy undertaking. Customer and competitive requirements, time-to-market, architectural and quality considerations, staffing levels and expertise, potential risks, and many other factors must be carefully weighed and considered. What can make software planning even more complicated, however, is that software development costs only comprise a portion – often the smaller portion – of the total cost of software ownership. In fact, the development process, itself, invariably has a significant impact on total cost of ownership as tradeoffs are evaluated and compromises made which impact software sustainability and maintainability of software over time.
Because software doesn’t wear out like car tires do, software planners may underestimate how much a code stream can degrade over time with the accumulation of patches, system and configuration changes, provisioning and re-provisioning, integrations, and ongoing development. Further, the rigorous standards applied during initial software development may end up being compromised as maintenance personnel are diverted to emerging or mission-critical software issues. Over time, accumulation of poorly managed changes almost always generates software instability and a significant increase in the cost of software maintenance – up to four times the cost of initial development, according to some estimates.
This session will provide a systematic approach to addressing total cost of ownership across the software lifecycle, including design for maintainability, development of measurement criteria, collection of metrics, and industry standards, guidelines, and best practice options. Parametric modeling will be discussed using the SEER platform as a specific example of this approach. Estimating block changes and their potential interdependencies and impacts will also be covered.
Click here to see the slides.
Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.
Project Prediction Infographic
