Unseen / Unknown Scope Does makes a software development project to fail?
Based on studies, it’s found that – 62% of organizations have experienced with failures in their software development projects. These numbers become really very important and eye openers because one project is mostly linked with atleast two organizations. Hence, one failure always impact min. two organizations or teams for their waste of time, efforts, energy, manpower and money. So why does a software development project fails?
There are so many reasons for these failures which includes incompetency of team, their technical know-how, team communication, envision & speculation of system requirements, unseen / unknown areas of the system etc. Let me talk about various examples/areas of ‘Unseen / Unknown’ factor here.
Every project starts with an idea or a thought to build something in order to help the community, to provide information, to automate a process, to increase productivity or efficiency etc. Once this idea has been thought over that yes it needs going forward, a development team is called upon. This is the first time for an interaction between the ‘idea people’ and ‘development team’. Now, the exchange of vision starts. This is the most important step of the whole project and always been taken very lightly. Problems here are: Real users (those who are going to use this software which in many cases are not the ‘idea people’) are always kept out of this. Another one is, ‘idea people’ are creating a vision from manager stand point and ‘development team’ is coming from technical side which starts creating a how-to-do-it in their technical mindset without even understanding the project in totality.
In construction projects e.g. house or commercial complex building, How many times have you heard that the house / commercial building was demolished just after completion? Why such projects (which have high cost investment requirements) have almost zero(0) completion failures? Unlike software development projects, construction projects are always driven with ‘concept model’ or ‘prototypes’. Although they need time & money to build concept models too, but once done, the full-view of vision is in front of whole team and everyone understands the reasons of various components in the model. Meaning, for your software development projects too, you should consider developing your concept model – to make it sure, what will be developed is what you wanted to be developed.
Lot many times, stakeholders (the visionaries) does not try to understand the technical limitations & expansion possibilities. And due to that, they at times opt for quick implementations with the words like ‘just do this for now’. A good example is Roles & Security. People start with a thought of normal users and managers to be using the system with users permitted to do lot of operations themselves. But later they bring in various types of users, supervisors, area / divisional managers etc with different roles and permissions. Another good example is Reports. In the beginning, people don’t see the depth and importance of reports. For them, seeing data is report. Since reports are basically driven by data only but dependent on various criteria filters and summarizations, you need to capture those parameters at the time of taking data into the software. Sometimes making these parameter additions / changes in future might require more time, efforts and money rather than if they would been thought over beforehand.
And lastly, but really very important factor is pricing. Due to all above unseen / unknown happenings, development team under-estimates the project or ‘idea people’ are unaware of cost implication due to such factors. And when these things start poping up, both teams (idea people & development people) are back into discussions, fights and arguments. By then, software development work has already been stopped and everyone is putting in their valuable time in arguments.
If all team members are aware of expansions & limitations, user-interface possibilities, crystal clear vision for the end product, openess to adapt and speculation of future possibilities with their next phase implementation – each software development project will be a SUCCESS!
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