Satisfaction with the success of large IT projects is still very limited. The German Federal Audit Court (“Bundesrechnungshof”) is repeatedly quoted complaining about the poor quality of the business plans and the inadequate management and control of public IT projects. The failure of projects such as the universal tax software "Fiscus" have cost the German tax payer hundreds of million Euros. In the specialist literature one can regularly read about projects that have gone off the rails or failed completely.

And nearly everyone who has been involved in large IT projects has their own personal story to tell of project failure. The Standish Group, which has been publishing its “Chaos Report” on the success of IT projects since 1994, can confirm this: only about 30 percent of large IT projects end up with the desired results within the planned budget. The rest produce delayed or reduced results. About 15 percent fail completely.  

Positive trends have been identified too: typical overspending has been reduced from 180 percent to approximately 50 percent, time overruns from 160 to 80 percent. But all in all things are still far from satisfactory.  

The causes of complexity in IT projects:

• IT projects have to satisfy a whole range of individual demands. These demands are made by different interest groups with different, sometimes contradictory, views.
• Often the drivers for the introduction of a larger IT system are measures to reduce costs. The accompanying business case assumes that in parallel there will be an optimization of processes and organizational structures, which turns the IT environment into a type of „moving target“.
• The new system is generally intended to replace manual interaction and to automate a variety of processes. High availability and reliability are thus prerequisites. At the same time the solution is implemented in an environment which is volatile, so it must be open to adaptations and be very flexible.
• Those who are to use the system later often have little experience or only minimal training, and thus demand a system which is simple and intuitive to use.
• The IT system is intended to support the differentiation of the company in competition. It therefore has a very individual character (range of functions) and needs one-off solutions for which no exact references exist.
• There are a large number of valid alternative solutions, but few positive blueprints upon which the IT architect can base their work.
• The system combines numerous function modules and interrelates with a number of external objects, such as users and other systems, via a variety of interfaces.
• The planned IT system manages a variety of data structures which it uses to map complex processes and real world conditions.
• A tight financial budget forces the project manager into reducing investments for planning, testing and training to an absolute minimum.