Took note of an interesting post by Nick Carr about another huge software project bust, this time at Lloyd's of London. As Carr's post suggests, when big software projects fail, a lot of people take notice. And, as his post also suggests, the reason that so many large IT projects fail, or at least the reason we most like to cite, is that they are, well, very large. There is no doubt that large software projects are prone to a lot of problems and I am by no means defending them. I think Carr makes a great point when he says: you should always create software to solve the day-to-day problems faced by the actual users, not to meet big abstract organizational challenges. Solve enough little problems, and the big ones take care of themselves...
But after being in the software implementation business these past 12 years, and most recently in the NetSuite implementation world, I can say flat out that software projects are difficult and they can fail at any level. They don't need to be large; it's just that we hear the large ones. In my experience most software projects are only marginally successful. I have had the most success with NetSuite in the small and medium business market, but the software that we replace has almost never met its potential. Part of the blame goes to the software, part to the implementation, part to management and part to users. But this is a huge subject and I don't want to gloss over it. This week I will talk each post about how software implementation can work. Our creed is a simple one: The most expensive software is the one that doesn't work. | 
