Creating Repeatable Success In Custom Software Development

A Series Proposing Strategies for Software Development Project Success

Software development is weird. Did you know that more than 70% of projects fail? 30% of software projects are never used in the real world at all - they are eventually, mercifully killed. It is usually unnecessary for software projects to fail. It is patently possible to start with an idea and navigate all the way to a successfully completed project. So, how is it that such rampant failure is accepted?

This is the beginning of a series dealing with factors for project success and project failure. I am going to treat this as a community collaboration project, where feedback will be incorporated into the articles until they are clear, succinct and actionable.

Most projects fail before the first line of code is written. In this article, I will address two early project steps that are often overlooked or underappreciated. Repeat that mistake, and your chances of project failure are nearly guaranteed.

Project Charter

I have seen three types of projects - projects with no charter, projects with perfunctory charters and projects with a chance to succeed.

The project charter answers the most critical and most commonly ignored question in software development - WHY? Why are we doing this project? I cannot imagine building software without a thorough understanding of the business justification for the project.

The business justification provides the rationale for project governance in budget negotiations, scope tradeoffs and risk management. It’s simply impossible to successfully build meaningful software without knowing the business justification. 

Beyond the critical question of “Why?” the charter defines the project sponsor, the key stakeholders, team, budget, objectives, key assumptions and constraints affecting the project, important risks, and criteria for success.

Finally, critically, the project charter empowers the project manager, granting the authority to execute the project.

A sample project charter is found in the references at the end of this article. We'll deal with project charters in detail in a subsequent article.

Project Budget

Inadequate project budget is identified as the second most common cause of project failure. There are strategies to accomplish the goals of a project, without undue risk, while conforming to a budget lower than the estimated cost of the project. Before discussing the strategies to successfully complete a project on a limited budget, let’s look at the failed strategies most frequently employed:

1. Insist that the project team make the budget work - the actual cost of a project is not reduced by angry voices, threats of termination, etc.
2. Throw the project offshore - Offshoring a project is no simple matter. One cannot simply throw the project offshore. It requires expertise and intentionality to manage costs through lower cost labor.
3. Wishful thinking - ignore the project risks and just assume the best case scenario for the project.

I have seen inadequate budgets addressed with these three strategies many times over the years. I have never seen it work out well.

Overcoming Inadequate Project Funding

There are strategies by which you can overcome inadequate project funding:

1. Decrease cost of labor

A strategy to decrease the cost of your project is to use a lower cost labor pool, usually by engaging offshore developers. The key here is to understand the special risks going offshore introduces on your project, and understand the culture-specific nuances of every offshore development market.

Attempting to engage an offshore team without expertise on successful offshore project execution on your team dramatically increases risk of failure. An expert on your team should be intentional in risk management specific to the offshore engagement from the beginning. They should facilitate the vendor selection, knowledge transfer, project planning and project execution based upon industry best practices for engagement with the specific market where your project is executed.  

2. Decrease project scope

In many cases, it’s possible to negotiate a scope reduction to meet the goals of the project without exceeding the project budget. Notice - if you do not have a project charter, then you do not have the information necessary to propose scope changes which will keep the project aligned with the project’s business justification.

3. Leverage open source and off-the-shelf software for components of the system -

My software development practice is based upon a policy of avoiding custom software development whenever possible. When custom software development is required, then we work very hard to avoid inventing new code patterns. These two principles dramatically decrease total cost of construction in software development.

It is critical to perform necessary due diligence when leveraging open source and OTS software in a custom platform. This topic will be addressed in a separate article.  

Conclusion

The probability of project success significantly increases when a proper project charter has been approved by the controlling entity and the project is sufficiently funded based upon a realistic project cost estimate.