Clearly government issued contracts are not a representative sample of all
IT contracts or programming projects. I am not even sure you could come up
with a definition of an IT project that would let you measure the failure
rate accurately.
It reminds me of the percent complete numbers that were thrown around when I
was working on the Y2K project for RPMS. The unit they were using was the
package. I think there were between 150 and 200 packages. As I recall more
than 33% of the RPMS routines are lab routines. If on April 30, 1999
somebody said the Y2K project was 75% complete and the lab package was not
done, were we 75% complete?
Jim Gray
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Toppenberg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2005 9:19 PM
Subject: Re: [Hardhats-members] Goedelian malaise
I think the key phrase in the paragraph was "government issued contracts."
:-)
But honestly, think of the computer gaming industry that is cranking
out games these days as fast as new episodes of "Despirate
Housewives". I doubt that 75% of money spent in that field ends up
wasted. It wouldn't be tolerated.
Kevin
On 11/13/05, Richard G. DAVIS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Believe what ever you want to Kevin. There is, none the less, broad and
durable finding of fact that establishes this estimate of 75% is in the
range of what is really happening out there.
One major study by the GAO of government issued contracts for IT
deliverables found that 97% of the contracts were finally terminated
without
the government ever getting an installed as ordered product. Only 3% of
the contracts were considered to have been successful. The number of
contracts studied exceeded one hundred, and may have been above 300, but
my
memory on that point is cloudy.
As I recall, of those 97% failures, over 90% of these were NEVER delivered
by the contractors.
A search of the GAO government archives will produce this report, and the
many similar studies that followed over the years.
Notice Kevin, that when the contractor you order from never even sends you
an empty box, criteria really don't matter at all. Failure to deliver is
not really much a matter of judging shades of gray.
Regards,
Richard.
> From: Kevin Toppenberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Reply-To: [email protected]
> Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 10:16:54 -0500
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [Hardhats-members] Goedelian malaise
>
> I have a hard time believing that 75% of projects fail. Based on what
> criteria?
>
> Kevin
>
> On 11/12/05, Gregory Woodhouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> This does have anything specifically to do with medical information
>> systems in general or VistA in particular, so feel free to stop
>> reading now, if you wish. But it does have to do with the quality of
>> software in general, and so is related (albeit indirectly) to
>> healthcare informatics, and to VistA.
>>
>> A well known statistic in the computer industry is that 75% of
>> projects fail -- and that's only the beginning of the story when it
>> comes to issues of software cost and quality. Why is this? No doubt,
> -snip-
>
>
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