The 40 root causes of troubled IT projects

A systematic literature review to identify and classify software requirement errors

“…The third source of errors include studies that describe the root causes (some of whom were those belonging to requirement stage) of troubled IT projects [7,39,76]. Examples of the errors from these studies include: unrealistic business plan, use of immature technology, not involving user at all stages, lack of experienced or capable management, and improper work environment.…”

“…Incomplete knowledge leading to poor plan on achieving goals [40] Mistakes in setting goals [40] Error in choosing the wrong method or wrong action to achieve goals [50,51] Some system-specific information was misunderstood leading to the selection of wrong method [33] Selection of a method that was successful on other projects [23,69] Inadequate setting of goals and objectives [76] Error in selecting a choice of a solution [56] Using an analogy to derive a sequence of actions from other similar situations resulting in the wrong choice of a sequence of actions [31,40,64,69] Transcription error, the developer understood everything but simply made a mistake [60] Table 19…”

External disturbance control for software project management

“…The best description of causes of project failure is that given by Smith [1]. He gives 40 root causes divided into project conception, initiation/mobilisation, design, development, implementation and operation (Table 1).…”

“…Software projects still have a low success rate in terms of reliability, meeting due dates and working within assigned budgets [1,2]. Factors, which determine successful project management [3], may be related to technical production processes, time scheduling in a dynamic environment and individual differences in project managers, members and team processes.…”

How to steer an embedded software project: tactics for selecting the software process model

“…Similarly, we have distilled distinct project problem areas and risk factors based on well-known investigations (for example [8,[11][12][13][16][17][18]24,[32][33][34][40][41][42][43]52]) coupled with our own large embedded software project experiences. Currently our matrix includes some 50 problem items (rows).…”