Only one IT project from eight - successful

The project is good when the plan of its implementation is developed. In turn, the plan is good if it provides strategy, tactics and the budget. Planning and strategy, certainly, are important, but the reasons of failures of the IT project are numerous and various. It can be external factors, errors of management, technical issues, weak PR, lack of attention, failure to follow partner obligations and also above-mentioned - lack of strategy and planning.

There is a broad range of the reasons of failure of projects: canceling, accomplishment delays, the serious exceeding of the budget putting a project deliverable in position "it is unknown, what is better: complete it or not undertake at all". Chartered Institute for IT (earlier known as the British computer community - BCS) in 2008 investigated failures of IT projects. By a research it is set – only one of eight projects can be considered in fact successful, that do not correspond to criteria of time, quality and cost.

As a result experts drew a conclusion: despite of failures, the huge amounts are invested in projects of information systems and are written off. For example, the cost of failure projects in the European Union, in 2004, was €142 billion.

But all failures have indicators which allow managers to prevent present projects from collapse in an abyss. But it is all the same does not save from errors. The most known IT error of the government of Great Britain in 1999 - the Passport Agency project which had a huge impact on public opinion. In the summer of 1999 because of failure of a computer system in the passport agency of the state the holidays were forced to cancel many people. The cost of the IT project of the passport agency of Great Britain cost taxpayers £12 million.

The new computer system of regional departments created a jam which forced applicants to expect obtaining the passport up to six weeks, instead of ten days. In July more than half a million passports were processed, and thousands of people were forced to cancel or change plans of the trips.

The post-crisis analysis revealed problems of a new system at offices of Liverpool and Newport: training of personnel was insufficient, and data entry took more time, than it was expected. Besides, problems in Liverpool were solved not earlier than a system in Newport was introduced, but the additional personnel were not accepted at an early stage as budgets were spent. The total cost of a failure was estimated at £21 million.

In this project it is possible to note numerous failures: planning, management, training, financing of contingencies and strategy. PR was also bad. The lack of the good PR-plan presented to media significant date, and the public had for a long time no idea why obtaining the passport takes a lot of time. Charges of IT failures, unfortunately, are too frequent, but, at least, they are rather transparent.

In the private sector of IT failure are frequent, but they are not so expensive, and usually carefully mask them from public eyes. However, when clients can see results, hide IT failures much more difficultly. So was in a case with British Gas (Centrica belongs) in 2006-2007. A huge number of clients addressed with complaints to the company and power supervision (EnergyWatch) because of the bills which are mistakenly made out them.

Centrica stated - the problem is caused by defect of a billing system Jupiter which was installed by Accenture, by worth £300 million of Centrica claimed initially that it in the "millions of errors" code and filed a lawsuit the claim against £182 million, for moral damage. The end is still not put to this story as case will be heard in court only next year.