A self-paced online course that teaches you the neuroscience behind the biggest reason why IT projects fail — and gives you a simple, proven methodology to fix it. Built on 300+ years of combined experience across thousands of projects.
Every year, IT project failures cost the US economy roughly $2.5 Trillion. 70% of all IT projects experience some level of failure. For large projects over $1 Million, the failure rate climbs to 95%. McKinsey and Oxford University found that 1 in 6 large IT projects goes so badly that they threaten to bankrupt the business.
The research is clear on why: 75% of these failures trace back to a single root cause — the business never fully communicates what it needs to the technology team. Not because people are careless. Because human brains are neurologically wired to omit critical details.
This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a human cognition problem. And until you address it, no methodology, framework, or tool will fix your project outcomes.
Annual cost of IT project failures in the US alone
Failure rate for large IT projects over $1 million
Of those failures caused by one root issue: bad requirements
Sources: CISQ/Carnegie Mellon, McKinsey & Oxford University, Standish Group, PMI
The course has four parts, each building on the last. You’ll move from understanding why projects fail to having the tools and skills to prevent it.
The frequency, costs, and primary cause of IT project failures. You’ll understand the scale of the problem and why conventional approaches haven’t fixed it.
Why our brains sabotage project communications. You’ll learn the 10 cognitive constraints — including the paradox of expertise, mental models, and the 7±2 memory limit — that make complete communication neurologically impossible without structured help.
The specific points in a project where miscommunications most commonly occur. You’ll learn to recognize the warning signs before they become expensive failures.
The Business Execution Lifecycle — a universal model of how all business processes work — and the Business Requirements Roadmap, a structured set of questions that systematically uncovers what stakeholders forget to share and tech teams forget to ask.
Project Managers & Program Managers Tired of watching projects derail for the same reasons every time. You need a methodology that actually prevents failure instead of just managing it.
IT Directors, CIOs & CTOs Under pressure to improve delivery rates and ROI. You need your teams equipped with skills that move the needle, not another certification that gathers dust.
Business Analysts & Requirements Engineers You know requirements gathering is broken but you’ve never been given the right tools. Interviews and JAD sessions only capture what people remember to say — not what they forget.
PMO Directors Looking for a scalable methodology you can roll out across your organization. One that works regardless of whether your teams use Waterfall, Agile, or something in between.
Business & Process Owners You know your process better than anyone — but you’ve experienced the frustration of technology teams building something that doesn’t match what you need. This course explains why that keeps happening and how to fix it.
Anyone Leading IT-Enabled Change Digital transformation, AI initiatives, ERP implementations, process automation — if technology is involved, requirements are involved. This course applies to all of them.
Self-paced video lessons covering all four parts of the course. Learn on your own schedule, at your own pace. Pause, rewind, revisit anytime.
Knowledge checks and quizzes after each module. Downloadable tools, templates, and cheat sheets you can apply immediately to your own projects.
Live weekly office hours with the instructor. Ask questions, discuss your specific project challenges, and get real-time guidance from someone who’s done this thousands of times.
A complete Business Requirements Roadmap — the structured question-based methodology you’ll use on every project going forward. This is the tool that makes everything else click.
Dave Burrill is the Managing Director of Bridging Business & IT and the lead instructor of this course. Over a career spanning decades, Dave has held virtually every role in the technology and business landscape: analyst, auditor, architect, consultant, CIO, Project Manager, Product Manager, software engineer, SaaS executive, founder, board member, and academic researcher.
Together with a team that brings over 300 years of combined experience, Dave has worked on thousands of projects in over 700 companies — and has seen the same communication failures destroy outcomes over and over again. This course distills everything our team has learned about why projects fail and how to fix it into a structured, teachable methodology that anyone can apply.
This isn’t academic theory. Every concept in this course was forged in the field and refined across decades of real-world project delivery.
Our methodology has been applied across industries, saving organizations millions in avoided failures and rework.
A global electronics manufacturer wasted 7 months and $120,000 trying to build the wrong solution. Six hours of structured requirements gathering using our methodology revealed the real requirements and got the project back on track.
A major US mortgage lender had burned through $2 million and 18 months on a data warehouse project with nothing to show for it. Fifty hours of requirements work using our Roadmap saved the project and delivered results.
A national healthcare company used our methodology creatively to reverse-engineer a supplier’s true costs. The result: $5.4 million in savings on a single three-year contract renewal.
“In this new era of AI tooling the most important skill you can have is the ability to describe a business process accurately end to end. This course has given me the skill and confidence to help my company in ways I thought I never could. I keep using the frameworks and my coworkers keep asking me where I learned all this!”
Paul Jones, ADP
“I have been teaching Project Management best practices in professional settings for the last 20 years, to hundreds if not thousands of students, and I have NEVER encountered frameworks like Dave has come up with. His videos make things so clear and actionable. This is a breakthrough in our industry”
Joyce Hunter, Deputy CISO U.S. Department of War
“Learning about the neuroscience at play and the better understanding the way our brains are wired is invaluable. This course will teach you to work with our brains, not against them like we’ve been doing for so long.”
Doreen Smith, CPA
Three tiers designed for different needs.
✓ Designed for Executives, Project Sponsors, & Business Managers
✓ Understand the primary problem: 70% of IT projects fail, and 75% trace back to bad requirements
✓ Learn the recently discovered neurological reasons behind these failures
✓ Identify the landmines executives need to watch out for on every project
✓ Get introduced to the proven solution and methodology
✓ 30-day access
Everything in Executive Essentials, plus:
✓ Designed for CIOs & IT Leaders, PMO Directors & Project Managers, Product Managers, Analysts, Business/Product Owners, SMEs, & Tech Leads
✓ In-depth explanations of the most common IT & AI project landmines and how to avoid them
✓ Secrets to defining AI specs, laying a bullet-proof project foundation, & saving projects in crisis
✓ Online toolkit practitioners can immediately use to streamline IT projects & leverage AI
✓ Maximize business value with a structured, repeatable methodology
✓ Live weekly office hours with the instructor
✓ Certificate of completion – 32 Hrs of CPE
✓ 60-day access
Everything in Foundations, plus:
✓ Downloadable toolkit for use across your organization
✓ Access to the support community
✓ Ongoing group coaching with expert instructors
✓ Student shared case study reviews
✓ Practice and refine your skillset with guidance at each step
✓ Prerequisite for Practitioner Certification
✓ Team licensing options
✓ 365-day access
Those certifications teach project administration, agile methodology, or business analysis techniques. They offer 15 different ways to ask questions — interviews, JAD sessions, focus groups — but they never tell you what questions to ask. BBIT fills the gap they all leave open by providing a structured methodology for uncovering the specific requirements that stakeholders forget to share.
Free courses teach general concepts. This course gives you a proprietary methodology — the Business Execution Lifecycle and Business Requirements Roadmap — that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It was developed over 40+ years across thousands of projects. If it prevents even one failed project, the ROI is measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. IEEE data shows that catching requirements issues early costs 36–50x less than fixing them later.
Our courses are fully self-paced, but we offer weekly office hours where anyone can come to ask questions and get further clarification. Most students complete it in 20–40 hours spread over several weeks. More importantly, IEEE research shows that IT teams spend nearly 50% of their time on rework caused by bad requirements. Investing 20–40 hours now saves thousands of hours later.
Many employers cover professional development costs, especially for training directly tied to project outcomes. All of our courses are designed for employer-funded enrollment.
The methodology taught in this course has been applied successfully across thousands of projects in thousands of companies over 40+ years. We don’t offer a money-back guarantee because we can’t control what you do with that methodology once you have it. That said, if you complete the course, apply the Roadmap to a real project, and don’t see improvement in your requirements quality, contact us and we’ll work with you directly.
The Business Execution Lifecycle and Requirements Roadmap are development model and SDLC agnostic. They work with Waterfall, Agile, SAFe, hybrid, or any other approach. Requirements exist regardless of your development methodology — the question is whether you capture them properly.
Executive Essentials: 30 days. Practitioner Foundations: 60 days. Practitioner Academy: 365 days.
You’ll get access to the complete Business Requirements Roadmap — a structured, reusable tool you can apply to every project going forward. Plus downloadable templates, cheat sheets, and a case study walkthrough showing the methodology applied to a fictitious project. This course is about developing your skills, not just about sharing knowledge.
Check out which course is right for you above.
Questions? Email us at Dave@bridgingbusinessit.com