Project management perceptions

Over the years BCS has addressed the complexities of IT project management from many perspectives.

It remains one of the most popular topics we ever publish about - from the misnomer of labelling things IT project failures, when it is often not the IT that is at fault, to comparing waterfall to agile approaches; and evolving the criteria by which we judge IT projects, to the role of management understanding.

The ITNOW and Computer Bulletin archive gives plenty of material for further reading. In this research we asked both our main cohorts to simply tell us whether they have been involved in a failed project in the past five years and offered some simple top line options for their view of the reason for this... of IT leaders 41% said yes, among IT professionals 34% said yes.

The reasons were largely consistent - both cohorts had over 50% select ‘unclear goals and objectives’ as the top reason with ‘bad project management’ a close second. The clearest difference was ‘poor communication’ - 37% of IT professionals selected that, whilst only 28% of IT leaders did so.