10 Reasons Why Software Projects Fail

If you’re working for a large corporation, multiple teams not collaborating and communicating effectively may also lead to a project failure. I’ve seen this again and again when working with large companies, the IT, data owners, and dev teams not being on the same page often end up delaying projects.

Solution

By using Agile and other modern development methodologies, not only can you predict and meet your weekly and monthly deliverables but can also hand over to your test teams and get their feedback.

If there are potential delays for whatever reason, you want to let the business and stakeholders know about it and the reason behind it.

5. Underestimating cost of development

Cost is one of the major factors many projects never see a live date, specifically in the startup world. One of the most common reasons, among many others for startup failure is that they run of out of money. Businesses often underestimate the cost of software development.

Solution

Proper planning of resources and time estimates can help project the true cost of software development. If there are any surprises, let them be known to the financers of the project ahead of the time. No one wants surprises.

6. Moving targets

You can’t hit moving target with precision. This is exactly what happens. Many project owners and decision makers keep changing their requirements and project is never in its completed states and cannot be delivered.

Solution

A software product is never finished. Come up with a minimum viable product (MVP) that is good enough for the end customers to test drive and provide you with feedback. While you’re gathering the feedback, your Dev team continues to build other features. In the next release, implement the approved feedback and give your end users another release and continue the cycle.

7. Poor planning and project management

Constantly changing requirements, bad resources planning, not allocating enough resources for testing, integration, and bug fixes often lead to missing deliveries.

Solution

Good project management and proper planning can help overcome all of the above. It is the most important part of a successful project and team to have a good project manager who not only have the experience and skills but also have leadership skills to manage and motivate team to achieve their tasks.

8. Missing accountability and responsibility

It takes a village to deliver a successful software project. Software requires different teams with different experiences to collaborate on a single goal. In addition to the previous point, poor project planning and management, its vital that all team members are accountable and responsible for their deliverables.

I often found when working in large corporations that multiple teams are involved, and they often are not on same page or not committed to the project. To make a project successful, all team members must be committed to the deliverables and must be responsible for their tasks.

Solution

It is responsible of a project manager to get all teams members on the same page and if they are not responsible for their tasks, hold them accountable. Using good project management tools and best practices helps keeps all members involved honest.

9. Bad User Experience

User experience is very important to deliver a successful project. There are so many amazing products out there, but some don’t get adoption just because of the bad user experience.

Solution

Designers of the products should work with the dev team and end users to get their feedback while building the user experience. Make sure you have a diverse group of users.

10. Team not believing in project

As I said earlier, the success of the project is a teamwork. It is the responsibility of the founders and project managers to make their team believe in the project. To deliver a quality product on time and in budget depends on the team’s productivity. Team is more productive when their believe in the product, the vision, and the leadership.

Solution

During the design and usability experience phase, include your team and users and get their feedback. Fix the feedback and let them review it. Deploy the app in weekly and monthly deliverables and let the users test drive the product and provide you with feedback. Sometimes users may not be motivated to provide the feedback. You may need to incentivize users and also get their buy in by listening to them, give them importance and credit, and also if feasible and makes sense, implement their suggested features.

Here is a detailed video on the same:

11. Hiring Wrong Team

This mostly applies to new projects and new teams or outsourcing your project. This is the first reason most projects fail when a project owner asks for bidding and hires the cheapest cost among all. Would you hire a builder that is offering you the cheapest price to build your house? Would you hire a builder that has very little or no experience building homes? Would you hire a builder that is using inexperience contractors/labor? Probably not. A software is much more complicated than a building a home. When you are looking to hire a team, here are some of the key points to keep in mind.

• Does this team has skills and expertise to complete the project?
• Do they have delivered simplar projects on time and in budget?
• Do they have any product live that you can see as a working product?
• How was their relationship with the previous product owners?
• Can you get some testimonials?
• How about referrals and call some people who have worked with this team?
• Do some background check on the team members. These days so many peole fake or lie about their experience.

12. Not Happy Team

Build a new software product is quite complex task. For a house, there is a blue print and most of the work is labor-centric. Start with a foundation, contractors come and do their job. Start with walls, then kitchen, windows, doors, walls and so on. You can see, touch, and feel the material is being used and the result.

However, owners can't see, feel, or touch a software. Just because screens look good and work in demos doesn't mean they are done right. I've seen many projects works great when used by few people but once they go live for primetime and traffic increases, the crap out. They don't scale. They have security holes. They slows down as data size increases.

Why? It is becasue either the team wasn't experienced or weren't happy.

A unhappy team can' build good software.

If you are a project owner and your team is not happy for whatever reason (not motivated, not paid on time etc), you will not get a good product out of that team.

So, please take care of your team and make sure you listen to your team and take care of them.

Summary

It takes great teamwork to develop and deliver a successful project. In this article, I talked about my top 10 reasons for why most software projects fail. The key takeaways from my experience are making sure to have a clear understanding of the business requirements and get your end users involved early in the product development so they can provide their valuable feedback while you’re building the product. I hope you found this article useful.