I was recently fortunate enough to catch Max de Vries on a trip to the UK. Max has overseen complex IT projects in Europe, Asia and the US, in finance, public sector and now games for over 20 years, most recently being in charge of Popcap's Plants vs Zombies franchise, overseeing the launch of PvZ 2 and PvZ-Garden Warfare. I managed to fire off two quick questions before he had to go:

Q: What are the top 3 things every project manager should know?

Who to trust; how to communicate; and what would success look like.

Q: What are the common mistake that inexperienced project managers make?

• Not realizing they are inexperienced
• Making estimation a political process
• Miscalculating the cost of saying no vs the cost of failure
• Not thinking about the critical path hard enough
• Thinking that people know what they want
• Underestimating the value of a high functioning team
• With agile processes: Modifying a process without understanding the reasons why the process works and doesn't work

So now you know.

The Standish Group have been famously (notoriously) publishing their CHAOS Report with IT project success/failure/challenged rates since 1994. "XXX% of all IT projects fail!" headlines are doubtless responsible for their fortuitous fame but they have also attempted to analyse 'success factors' over the years:

1994	1999	2001	2004	2010, 2012
1. User Involvement 2. Executive Management Support 3. Clear Statement Of Requirements 4. Proper Planning 5. Realistic Expectations 6. Smaller Project Milestones 7. Competent Staff 8. Ownership 9. Clear Vision And Objectives 10. Hard-Working, Focused Staff	1. User Involvement 2. Executive Management Support 3. Smaller Project Milestones 4. Competent Staff 5. Ownership	1. Executive Management Support 2. User Involvement 3. Competent Staff 4. Smaller Project Milestones 5. Clear Vision And Objectives	1. User Involvement 2. Executive Management Support 3. Smaller Project Milestones 4. Hard-Working, Focused Staff 5. Clear Vision And Objectives	1. Executive Support 2. User Involvement 3. Clear Business Objectives 4. Emotional Maturity 5. Optimizing Scope 6. Agile Process 7. Project Management Expertise 8. Skilled Resources 9. Execution 10. Tools & Infrastructure

Little changes at the top. Executive support & user involvement were noted in the 1970s as 2 main success/fail factors. 'Agile Process' is an evolution of 'Smaller Project Milestones' (the bit of agile that's actually about process is "deliver working software frequently", which is "smaller project milestones" in olde 1990s language). 'Clear Vision and Objectives' is re-branded as 'Clear Business Objectives'

But note the varying evaluation of the importance of the people. At one level technical stuff will get done if and only if you have competent people actually doing it — it's make or break. But so are all the factors above "Skilled resource" or "Competent staff", albeit less obviously so.

Emotional Maturity is new. The cynic may note that the Standish group will sell you an Emotional Maturity Test Kit (the less cynical may say Standish are attempting to address a problem). Actually their analysis of emotional maturity is largely about character and behaviour which may be a sign that the English word 'emotion' has grown in what it means compared to 20 years ago. They include arrogance and fraudulence; I can see arrogance as a symptom of emotional immaturity, but fraudulence may mean "I've considered what counts as getting ahead in our society and it seems to me that taking the company for everything I can get before they take me for everything they can get is the way to go". Fraudulence is wrong, but ain't always emotional. I think "personal maturity" — or just maturity — is the idea they're grasping at. It's about having good people.

Scarcity of essential success factors

But the top factors are not prioritisable. I think they are all essential. Rating one above the other says more about relative scarcity than relative importance. When it's really hard to get competent, skilled, hard-working staff then that will be your top success factor. As it is, good executive support is harder to come by than competent staff. Apparently.

I'd summarise as follows:

• Good people
  • who know what they are trying to achieve
  • with good involvement & communication with who they're achieving it for
  • when well-supported

will succeed, if success is possible.

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More serious researchers point out all that is wrong with the Chaos report, most notably:

• unlike published academic research, the data we'd need to evaluate the claims is kept private so we can't verify their data or methods.
• Their definition of success is very narrow and doesn't mean success. It means "cost, time and content were accurately estimated up front". Which isn't at all the same as success except in areas which are so well understood that there really is nothing at all you can learn as you are doing it. That's not so common in technology projects.

For an alternative and probably more balanced view of the 'state of IT projects' I'd look at Scott Ambler's annnual surveys: http://www.ambysoft.com/surveys/