Why IT projects fail

As old as IT projects is the ability of people to screw them up. Technologies come and go, but another money pit fiasco is never far away, so what’s still going wrong

If people don’t want to change or see the point of a new piece of work they’ve been asked to do, they won’t do it. If they are resistant and still do it, they won’t do it very well.

The seemingly endless stream of reports and research into IT project failure shows no sign of abating, with analysts always finding another carcass of a botched ERP implementation to pick the bones out of, or a failed government transformation programme.

Any notion that things might have improved because of the changing dynamic in the way business technology is delivered and consumed is largely dismissed by Chris Weston, a European advisory principal at IDC.

“Cloud computing ...