Large public sector projects are almost always late, we’ve already asked if this matters, today we’re going to show you just how many big projects fail or are late. We ran across some interesting data from Capers Jones (from “Estimating Software Costs” – 1998) that we turned into this graph:
The graph points out some interesting things:
- 72% of large projects (MMIS and TANF systems fall into this category) are late or fail (about half FAIL)
- Only 28% of these systems are delivered on time
- Virtually none are delivered ahead of schedule
Based on these statistics there is a high probability that your next project will at least be late. In the coming weeks we’ll analyze some of the reasons why.