Continuing on the topic of yesterdays blog; if you are looking for answers to why projects fail or succeed, you are bound to find The Standish Group CHAOS reports pretty quick. (Be aware of the one that is very generously referred to where the IT managers have responded to what factor that generates success and what generates disaster! The data is EONS of time old measured in the history of IT, since it is from before the internet boomed.)
The latest report was released early 2020. The success rate for software development is still not very high to express it mildly. 31%. Hmm. I am not sure what to do with that number. Better perhaps.
I haven’t bought the report, if you want to read some more here is a link to a blog post about it:
Reading about factors of success, you find the three most important factors:
- good place
- good team and
- good sponsor
Here it gets interesting given my studies. A good sponsor is the third greatest success factors. It is also the lowest hanging fruit, the easiest thing to adjust since only one person in the project is sponsor. Sounds good?!
I thought to myself “What is a Project sponsor?”. So looking in the course literature it is written about in one page, p29, saying; “The project sponsor is generally accountable for the development and maintenance of te project business case document.”
That is it! But then it actually gets worse.
The epilogue of the report summarized in the blog linked above says:
“The Agile Period started around the year 2000 – and their prediction is that it will end shortly. They are now seeing the beginning of what they call the Infinite Flow Period, and they imagine that the Flow Period will last at least 20 years. In the Flow Period, there will be no project budgets, project plans, project managers, or Scrum masters.”
Gah! Am I going to be without a job? Are IT project managers one of the roles that is going to be redundant in this AI/IT evolution?
Well, personally I think that it is a role that will not disappear. It might change and evolve. Perhaps get a new name. But look at the success rate for software project above. Too many good project managers are not listed as one of the failure factors, as far as I know.
But hey, it might be a good idea to include a short course about sponsor-responsibilities, right? 😉
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”.
(J. R. R. Tolkien) so I will break for the weekend now!
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