ABSTRACT
Research Problem Software development project disasters make worldwide headlines, and organizations have lost billions of dollars due to poor project implementations (Nash, 2000). The $4 billion loss by the IRS due to the inability to integrate obsolete systems (Abbott, 2000) and the cancellation of the Taurus system after spending over £80 million by the London Stock Exchange (Drummond, 1996) are examples of notable software development failures. The Standish Group, a research advisory firm, reports that only a third of the more than 13,500 software development projects evaluated in the 2003 CHAOS report were successful, and half of the software development projects in their report are classified as challenged, meaning these projects experienced cost and budget overruns (Larkowski, 2003). While this statistic on the state of software project management is gloomy, the state of project management is improving. For example, in 1994, the success rate of projects was only 16 percent (Larkowski, 2003). Although the percentage of successful software projects has doubled in the past decade, organizations must continue to find ways to reduce or, preferably, eliminate unnecessary spending due to problems in software project management.
