Software project success: moving beyond failure.

Success and failure in software projects appear to be difficult to define. While there is a consensus around the prevalence of project failure, new projects seem destined to repeat past mistakes. This paper tries to advance the discussion by offering a new perspective for reasoning about the meaning of success and the different types of failures. In order to court project success, practitioners need to rise beyond a fixation with internal parameters of efficiency to recognise the role of quality in bringing about the effectiveness required to secure project success. The paper begins by discussing project failure surveys and the impact of project constraints before offering a richer model that identifies the crucial role of quality in securing future success. The paper concludes by introducing a series of mini- case studies that help in making sense of success and failure and in particular highlight the interplay between the four levels of success