Just in time for Halloween, some wonderful project failures through the ages

1. City of New York Time Keeping System, 10x over budget, from 60 million to 600 million.  Fraud suspected. Incompetence clear.
2. The NHS’ Civilian IT Project. Electronic records for patients, for the whole of UK, rolled out at large scale instead of targeted pilots.
3. Denver International Airport’s Automated Baggage System 2 billion due to unrealistic hard deadline, underscoping and bad definition of done.
4. US military Expeditionary Combat Support System. A billion USD, rounded to about two or something insignificant like that.
5. Thanks to Sweden’s somewhat higher government transparency, we are aware of the failures in IT projects in dental insurance, patent filing and police case management – the royal trifecta, with a cost of about a billion USD total.

We might as well stop looking for individual “reasons” for failure. Nepotism, lack of self-awareness, refusal to inspect and adapt and outsourcing are the root cause. But really, no surprises. More than half IT projects fail.

https://www.cio.com/article/3068502/more-than-half-of-it-projects-still-failing.html

Sources

1. https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/company-in-citytime-payroll-scandal-to-pay-500-million/?hp
2. The allways tasty wikipedia IT failures list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_custom_software_projects