8 Reasons Why Software Projects Fail

Common Causes Of An IT/ Software Project Failure

1) Inadequate/ Insufficient details of the scope/ requirements in the Project requirements documentation - Responsibility of Business Analyst

2) Inaccurate/ Imprecise mapping of IT requirements to IT functional design 
- Responsibility of IT analyst

3) Improper contingency planning, that is, lack of backup of key human resources 
- Responsibility of Project Manager

4) Inability to identify the implicit requirements, for example, minute details of how a user interface should look like, performance tuning requirements etc.

- Responsibility of Business Analyst and IT Analyst

5) Failure to assess impact of other ongoing and upcoming projects/ initiatives

- Responsibility of Project Manager

6) Failure to lay down a proper communication protocol and execute the same. This is a very important aspect for large projects with global teams. Few key details include: timing of global meetings, circulation of minutes of meeting, identifying who needs to attend which meeting and making sure that unnecessary meetings don't eat lot of valuable time of team members.

- Responsibility of Project Manager

7) Making sure that you have right people at the right place. If you fail to do so then you are up for failure. For example, your onsite coordinator should be one with excellent collaboration skills and with a great attitude to sync up and work closely with the offshore team.

- Responsibility of Project Manager at the time of resource planning

8) Last but not the least, the software testing team should have an early engagement with the software development team so that they ensure that every detail of requirements and scope is captured in the test cases. Improper test case coverage is one of the prime reason for software project failure.