Why Projects Fail and What You can do About It

Software projects have the power to increase a company’s bottom line while simultaneously creating more efficient business processes. Most are either delivered late, way over budget, don’t meet customer needs, or are cancelled altogether. According to the Business Analysis Benchmark 2008 study that surveyed 110 companies, nearly seven out of 10 companies involved in development projects valued at $250,000 or more have software projects that are marginal in quality and function—or are complete failures. These failures occur early on in the development phase of the project—when requirements are first conceived and documented. According to Borland, the cost of correcting an erroneous requirement after a project has been released can be 100 times more expensive than if the error is discovered during the requirements development phase.

The right processes and software can help you optimize the requirements definition and management (RDM) and use it as a powerful lever to ensure project success. Requirements define the scope of work that developers and testers must execute on and project managers must manage to completion. When done well, requirements definition management (RDM) is a collaborative process of collecting, documenting, and validating a set of requirements that key project stakeholders and those responsible for building the software agree on. According to Standish Group (2004) three of the top five reasons software projects fail are tied to requirements:

• Users are not involved enough in requirements definition, which leads to inaccurate requirement
• Requirements are incomplete or don’t meet acceptance criteria
• Requirements are constantly changing, but these changes are not managed effectively

Your core business depends on the optimization of RDM. No longer can software development be classified as an IT process or project. It is more about the future of your company and its competitive advantage. Borland, an open ALM company, offers two products for defining and managing software requirements. Borland Caliber DefineIT is a complete software requirements definition system that provides support across four key requirements definition process areas: elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation. Borland CaliberRM is an enterprise software requirements management tool that facilitates collaboration, impact analysis, and communication, thereby enabling your software teams to deliver on key project milestones with greater accuracy and predictability.

Ravenflow, an award winning company in the requirements and definition department, recently unveiled RAVEN Express. It’s the world’s first requirements elicitation and definition product that directly integrates with Microsoft Word™. This innovative solution empowers business analysts to play a more active role in the requirements process, enabling them to automatically identify missing or incomplete requirements in Word documents with the push of a button. Requirements can come from all directions. Without collaboration, it is difficult to generate a consensus of requirements. Stakeholders will want to focus only on items that interest them. Without the right tools and automation in place, managing changes to requirements can be incredibly complex. Capturing and validating requirements up front will insure your project sets off on the right path, and stays there.

When To Give Your Website A Facelift

In today’s design driven business world your website is a consumer’s first impression of whether your company is legitimate. The same goes for prospective employees and potential clients. Like most companies that have been successful for the past few years updating the company website is probably on the to do list. But not all companies realize how important an updated website is, not only can it increase revenue it can do the same for potential client opportunities. Simple statistics tell you that every time your business is visited on the web 2 out of 3 will go to another company if they feel on look alone the site is questionable.

Older designs can cause visual fatigue which means a visitor may no longer “see” the information on the site, including recent updates or changes, because the site is all too familiar. Visitors expect freshness and newness because of the dynamic quality of the web. The other reason why websites should be updated is the more frequent updates the more likely the site will stay high on the page ranks of search engines. Only periodically will you need to do more of an overhaul on your website.

Determining when to do so depends on the type of website you have. A site that just describes a company and its services and capabilities is considered to be a “brochureware" site. These type of sites don’t use a lot of technology, like e-commerce or blogs, and should only be updated every three years at a minimum. But if the company changes frequently so should the websites look, for example magazine sites or fashion sites. Content-managed sites have a system that enables you or your employees to update the content regularly, giving the ability to add things like news posts and project notifications.

So exactly how often should websites get a total facelift? All sites should be given a fresh appearance at least every four years. Of course if your business or strategic plans change significantly so should your website. If your thinking of revamping your site let Rayshawn Technology help you in making the right decisions.

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Protect Your Assests

What is more important to your company than its hard earned assets? We really couldn't think of anything else either? That is why Asset Management is a fundamental business process. Asset Management determines corporate value and has a direct impact on profitability. Because so many companies pay little attention to managing asset disposal, 50 percent of assets on the books are either so poorly described or are no longer in use, they cannot be located during a physical audit. A majority of companies blindly believe that only 5 percent of asset registration is inaccurate. On average physical audits reveal 40 to 50 perfect inaccuracy of assets are well described, registered, and can be located. At that high of a percentage rate you then run into the factors that these missing assets "probably" exist but it is impossible to prove. Ten to 20 percent are described but cannot be found, meaning they may no longer exist. To improve accuracy strategies must be created with more in depth processes and information sources.

Inconsistency in information makes it hard for companies to answer the question, why? When a company is unable to justify what it has spent or what it has invested in problems will occur. These problems com primarily from issues where the lack of coordination between what the asset register has recorded within finance and inventory lists used by the rest of the company. Finance's primary objective is to record the asset value for depreciation purpose. Assets tend to be consolidated into a single figure without taking into account the number or complexity of the component parts. Business risk comes into play when companies approach asset management in a lazy manner. When asset information is poorly recorded problems in situations where repair and replace contracts for example can become null and void costing the company money it's already invested.

Poor, inconsistent asset information can leave a company in a vulnerable state in the cast of insurance or disaster recovery. Any inconsistency in the asset register could raise significant doubt for a company. Doubt which could delay payment in reporting an insurance claim or worse face charges for items that do not exist. There are software programs such as Extensis Portfolio 8.5 digital asset management software for Mac and PC platforms. The software gives the user the ability to visually organize, sort and preview your complete library of digital assets both online and offline. Its built-in automated features allow you to quickly embed metadata into, archive, and share your assets with partners, clients and vendors.

There is no excuse for such poor control over important business assets. Even a simple process of recording serial numbers, asset location and value meets not only the needs of the finance team but the ability to track assets for the entire company.

Please visit our website for more information! Rayshawn Technology