By:  Scott W. Ambler

In this article Scott W. Ambler, Practice Leader Agile Development in the IBM methods group, overviews agile software development and the implications for business analysts.

Recently I ran a survey which explored how people actually define success for IT projects and what the actual success rates are. It's critical to understand how people define success, and more importantly how the stakeholders of your current effort define success, otherwise you're at risk of going in the wrong direction. Some of the findings:

1. Agile projects have a 71.5% success rate, traditional projects a 62.8% success rate, and offshoring a 42.7% success rate.

Fixed-price IT projects seem to be part of the IT landscape, so "inevitable" that most IT professionals have given up and instead try to find ways to accommodate this questionable approach. Personally, I would prefer to actually fix the real problem and help to convince people to avoid fixed-price projects whenever they can.

The first step of addressing a problem is to recognize that you have one, and I believe that the real reason why so many organizations insist on fixed-price projects is that they don't understand the damage caused by this decision. My newsletter this month, The Dire Consequences of Fixed-Price IT Projects, overviews the problems. Sadly, many of them, such as BRUF and BDUF, are often thought to be best practices by many people. We have our work cut out for us.