quantmleap

My good friend, Shane Clauson, which I highly respect, both as a person and a professional, made me realize that my previous post (“The Scientific Method and the IT Projects Failure Rate debate“) is incomplete as, although it highlights a certain problem, it stops short of defining the impact and consequential cost of that problem.

As I was thinking about Shane’s comments (directed to me via Twitter) I came across two articles which further helped me pinpoint my argument, as will be detailed below.

I first came across an article published in NewScientist, titled “Martin Gardner: Exposing fads and fallacies“. For those who are not in the know, Martin Gardner, who passed away just few days ago, wrote the “Mathematical Games” column for Scientific American magazine for 25 years and published more than 70 books. The NewScientist article is relevant to our discussion here as it 1) gave me the title for this post ; and 2) demonstrated the need to tackle issues head on, irrespective of how complicated or ludicrous they seem.

I subsequently read an article in the Australian newspaper, “The Age”, telling the story of the ban put on the British doctor accused of conducting an unethical research leading to a world-wide fear that a common vaccine could cause autism.

It doesn’t require much explanation to argue the case that spreading a lie, when the subject of that lie is within a medical context, can have far reaching consequences. In the case of the vaccine-autism issue, the consequences were that many parents decided to abandon the vaccine and “Vaccination rates in Britain and other countries have not fully recovered since Dr Wakefield and his colleagues’ research was published in 1998, and there are measles outbreaks throughout Europe every year“.

I could have easily brought up a good number of other cases, from the medical arena, where the spread of inaccurate and misleading information has had far reaching impact on people and institutions.

So what about the current debate regarding the IT projects failure rate? Why does it matter? You say it’s 65%, he says it is  far lower, I say it is %34.5 – at the end of the day who cares and why is it important?

Let’s talk for a moment about Life Insurance.

Few years ago I’ve come to appreciate the fact that having a life insurance in place will buy me the peace of mind I need, thinking about the financial hardship I might bestow on my family, should anything prematurely happened to me. I quite vividly remember my meeting with my insurance broker. As we were discussing the various options in which I could possibly injure myself or get myself killed, the realization daunted on me that as the risk of dying seemed to increase by the second, so did the price I was willing to pay to mitigate that risk (i.e. the insurance premium). In short, the scaring technique applied on me by the insurance broker resulted in my willingness to impart of greater sums of money in order to buy that illusive peace of mind.

Ok, back to the discussion about IT Projects’ failure rate.

The impact of the over elaboration on the risk of implementing projects in the IT industry is threefold:

1. If you are a consultant whose area of specialty happens to be in the field of ‘assisting organizations in managing high risk IT projects’ – there are good chances that the demand for your services will increase, resulting in increased project costs.
2. The higher the perceived risk – the higher the chances of companies following a path of overly engineered processes resulting in increased cost and delivery time lines.
3. The human factor – with an atmosphere of ‘most IT projects fail’ there would expectantly be increased chances of reduced morale accompanied by the perpetuation of a defeatist or “death march” attitude in teams (something along the lines of “Why bother working hard if we’re going to fail anyways…”).

The bottom line is that the scare campaign is costing someone-somewhere real $$$’s. These additional costs do not necessarily translate to better success rate as, these additional costs are spread across projects which did not require these additional costs to be spent on in the first place but, like my life insurance example, were sucked into spending more believing this will buy them a better peace of mind.

Don’t get me wrong, I did get myself a life-insurance policy; and companies should invest in proper methodical processes.  These, however, need to be done based on factual statements, devoid of fads and fallacies while separating the science from the fiction.

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