In December, 2022 the Project Management Institute held their Global Summit Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. This is one of the roughly 25 out of 250+ presentations that were featured live. It's widely known that IT projects fail at an alarming rate. What's not widely known is that the cause of 75% of those failures is our inability to communicate. What's even less well known is that the cause of that inability is the human brain. This presentation explains how and why our brain sabotages our communications, and offers a simple way to fix that problem.

70% of enterprise IT projects, and 95% of those over a million dollars, fail. 75% of those failures are caused by one critical oversight—that nobody knows they’re making—the business never fully communicates to the tech team what the business is trying to do.

On today’s episode of State of the CIO, we have David Burrill joining us. Dave shares so many great insights for avoiding IT failures. He shares his experiences with IT failures including common problems like communication and processes and how proper questioning can eliminate these problems.

Covid-19 is rattling nerves, up-ending lives and sparking a huge expansion of the virtual workplace. For those contemplating or in the midst of sponsoring enterprise IT projects this is going to significantly expand the communication and execution challenges standing in the way of your success.

We’re not very good at it. In fact, playing Russian Roulette with five bullets in the gun (five out of six) actually has better odds of success than running a large IT project. Almost everyone in the industry has, at least some inkling, that this problem exists. But as with death, and such other unpleasantries, we don’t like to talk about it too much. It makes us uncomfortable.

Having initiated a discussion during my last post about the frequency of enterprise IT project failures, it’s time to address two other parameters of this issue. I’ll start by looking at the annual cost of these failures and conclude today with an introduction to their primary point of origin.