Your next project could be much more successful.

Product and technology projects are notoriously risky endeavours that frequently go over time and budget and deliver fewer benefits than expected. However, in a recent survey, the Project Management Institute found that 25% of projects met expectations, 64% were challenged, and 12% failed, which is a significant improvement over previous years.

In a report analysing 5000 digital transformation projects, the Standish Group found that four factors made 80% of the difference between success and failure, as shown below.

Small Agile Projects

Organising your project or program into small agile projects makes the most difference to project success. Research shows that small agile projects are six times more likely to succeed than large waterfall projects. This is what the Scrum and Agile people have been saying for a long time, and the research shows that it's true. If you can re-organise your large project or program into a set of small independent agile projects of 6 to 10 people, then you are much more likely to succeed than if you do one huge project. There are many ways of doing this. You can have product teams, feature set teams, platform teams and subsystem teams. The key is to organise them around business value while reducing dependencies as much as possible. You can find out a lot more about…