BCS/RAE Report spells out the Challenges of Complexity

"The Challenges of Complex IT Projects" is the report of a working group from The Royal Academy of Engineering and The British Computer Society, presenting findings as to why so many complex IT projects fail to deliver.

The report estimates that expenditure on IT in the UK public sector alone will top £12.4 billion in 2003/04, with the overall UK spend on IT projected to be £22.6 billion. 'Against this background, it is alarming that significant numbers of complex software and IT projects still fail to deliver key benefits on time and to target cost and specification. Whilst complex IT project success rates may be improving, the challenges associated with such projects are also increasing rapidly. These are fuelled in large part by the exponential growth in the capability of hardware and communications technology, and the corresponding inflation in people's expectations and ambition.'

The report attributes this failure to poor practice. 'This can be ascribed to the general absence of collective professionalism in the IT industry, as well as inadequacies in the education and training of customer and supplier staff at all levels. Moreover, there is a broad reluctance to accept that complex IT projects have many similarities with major engineering projects and would benefit from greater application of well established engineering and project management procedures.'

The report identifies a range of challenges and suggests ways of meeting them to improve the quality of complex IT projects delivered in the UK.

There are two explicit mentions for usability. The first mention comes in under 'Requirements management', where after noting that '"Humans are very poor at saying precisely what they do want and extraordinarily talented at recognising what they don't want" (M. Lunt)', the report goes on: 'Requirements definition is one of the most critical, and most challenging, stages of the project. Many projects fail due to flaws in the elucidation of requirements, others fail because the requirements have become obsolete by the time the project is delivered. In addition to functional requirements, i.e. what the system is supposed to do, performance requirements need to be defined. Performance requirements specify qualities such as reliability, security, speed and usability and considerable effort may need to be expended in meeting these requirements for complex systems.'

The second mention is in Appendix 3: Project Risks and Sources of Best Practice, under 'Requirements' where the report asks 'are all stakeholders involved in determining and validating requirements? Are requirements animated or exercised in support of validation? Have they been analysed rigorously to identify omissions and to remove contradictions? Are non-functional properties, e.g. usability, performance, defined? Are the requirements objectively testable? Are requirements prioritised in terms of their value to the customer? Have likely changes been identified and recorded?'

Associated Link: The full Report

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