Commentary

Bob Evans
Senior VP, Global CIO  

How To Stop IT Failures And The Four Horsemen Of Doom

What are the four main reasons IT projects fail? And do you know what the early-warning signs are for the approach of those dreaded Four Horsemen? Leon Kappelman, an IT professor who's been studying this issue for many years, will share the results of his extensive research into project failures in an upcoming Webinar. Leon is a prince of a guy and his Webinar is sure to be valuable.

What are the four main reasons IT projects fail? And do you know what the early-warning signs are for the approach of those dreaded Four Horsemen? Leon Kappelman, an IT professor who's been studying this issue for many years, will share the results of his extensive research into project failures in an upcoming Webinar. Leon is a prince of a guy and his Webinar is sure to be valuable.In a note to his newsletter subscribers, Leon says the Webinar is free and will be "hopefully fun and illuminating." You can register here. Under the headline "Early Warning Signs of IT Failure: The Four Horsemen of Doom," here's how Leon describes the event:

"Despite the fact that IT deals with 'modern' technologies, IT project management has a rather poor track record in the mastery of risks. Standish Group reminds us year after year that about 20% of IT projects are cancelled before completion and less than a third are finished on time and within budget with expected functionality. If the discussion is limited to larger and therefore riskier projects of 10,000 function points or more, Capers Jones points out that the cancellation rate more than doubles."

More Global CIO Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

But fear not -- the Webinar will offer hard-earned lessons into how to spot disasters-in-the-making and how to avoid the tar pits of colossal IT failures:

"However, the postmortem examination of IT projects reveals that long before the failure there were significant symptoms or 'early warning signs' of trouble. An early warning sign (EWS) is defined as an event or indication that predicts, cautions, or alerts one of possible or impending problems. EWS's provide an indication of manifesting risks and therefore likely future difficulties and failure. Enterprise and project managers need to ask themselves as early as possible whether any 'red flags' warrant significant project redirection or termination."

The Webinar is scheduled for Thursday, March 5, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Eastern time.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links