Avoiding the 90 Percentage Syndrome: Why Software Project Status Reports are Often Wrong (and What You Can Do About It)

Why Should You Attend:

Software projects often have a negative impact on compliance. Software dependent products and services may be delayed, and excessive warranty costs or penalties may be incurred. According to software industry benchmarks more than 60% of software projects are late, 45% are over budget, and deliver only 70% of promised functionality.

Attend this webinar to learn how you can avoid all of these issues by managing to set and deliver on appropriate and realistic expectations. The presentation will cover best practices in sizing and estimating, project planning, defect containment and status reporting to get it right everytime.

Note: This session does not require a technical background – you need not be a software development practitioner to understand the content of this session. This session has a management focus.

Areas Covered in the Seminar:

• Industry benchmarks on software project success and failure.
• Causes of the 90% Syndrome.
  • Unrealistic Estimates.
  • Inadequate Planning.
  • Insufficient Defect Containment.
  • Misleading Status Tracking.
• What You Can Do About It?
  • Sizing and Estimating Best Practices.
  • Planning Best Practices.
  • Defect Containment Best Practices.
  • Quality Adjusted Status Reporting.
• In-sourced vs. out-sourced.
• References.

Who Will Benefit:

This webinar will provide value to any firm whose success depends on software projects. Those that would benefit most include:

• Any executive depending on a software project
• Project managers
• Quality assurance managers
• Process improvement specialists
• Software metrics specialists
• Software process specialists

Instructor Profile:

Gary Gack, is the founder and President of Process-Fusion.net, a provider of Assessments, Strategy advice, Training, and Coaching relating to integration and deployment of software and IT best practices. Mr. Gack holds an MBA from the Wharton School, is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and an ASQ Certified Software Quality Engineer. He has more than 40 years of diverse experience, including more than 20 years focused on process improvement. He is the author of many articles and a book entitled Managing the Black Hole: The Executive's Guide to Software Project Risk.

Topic Background:

According to software industry benchmarks the average software project overruns schedule by more than 60% and budget by an average of 45%. And these are averages! Overruns frequently exceed 100%. An average software project delivers only 70% of promised functionality – “We’ll deliver the rest in the next release.”

On average over 10% of software projects costing over $1,000,000 are cancelled. Cancellation rates go up to 30% or more for projects costing over $25,000,000. The cost of a typical cancelled project totals over 100% of the cost of comparable size projects that are completed. One might assume problem projects are recognize early, but the data tell us that is not the case. In most cases status reports are all green until 90% of the schedule has been consumed – hence the famous “we’re 90% done 90% of the time syndrome.”

An average US software project finds only about 85% of the defects present before a software product is released for customer use. Best in class software groups find 99% of defects before release, and some do so at 50% less total cost.

When viewed from a cost of quality perspective the software industry is without doubt the worst performing segment of the economy. Most software groups spend 60-70% of total project effort finding and fixing defects – in other words, 60-70% of total effort is “non-value-added”. Even those few who are able to deliver adequate quality more or less on time and on budget are for the most part extremely inefficient. Best in class groups, fewer than 5% of all software groups, reduce the non-value added percentage to less than 30%.

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