Unveiling Software Project Discovery: Methodology and Importance Explained So far in this series, we have discussed the historical success rate of abysmal software projects and their causes and introduced the concept of project discovery to prevent software project failure. Today, we wrap up this series by discussing in detail how we conduct project discovery…
Project Discovery vs. Product Discovery: What’s the Difference and Why It Matters In the previous installment of this article series, we introduced the concept of discovery. Discovery is the process of learning and documenting important information about a project before the “real work” starts. The goal of discovery is to provide the development team…
Avoiding Software Project Failure: Identifying Common Mistakes and Solutions In the previous two articles in this series, we discussed the dismal success rates for software development projects and the top causes for these failures. Most IT project failures (whether related to software or not) can be traced to sub-optimal project environment factors, such…
Understanding the Causes of IT Project Failure: A Deep Dive into Software Development Challenges It’s a sad fact of modern It’s a sad fact of modern life: IT projects, in general, and enterprise software projects fail alarmingly. Consider the following sobering statistics gathered from various recent IT surveys: 75% of surveyed IT and corporate…
Tips for Making a Build vs. Buy Decision Through the course of this series of articles, you’ve seen how important it is to make an informed decision when choosing whether to build a software solution from scratch, buy a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution, or go with a hybrid approach of buying and customizing a…
Build vs. Buy vs. Hybrid: Decision Criteria If you’ve read this far in this series, you know the significant advantages and disadvantages of the three approaches to implementing a digital solution, that is, Building custom software Buying commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software The hybrid approach of buying COTS software and customizing it Is there a simple…
The Best of Both Worlds: Pros and Cons of Hybrid Build–Buy What if “build vs. buy” wasn’t an either–or proposition? Is there another path that realizes the benefits of each approach while minimizing the risks of both? Indeed, there is. We call it the hybrid approach. There are two main ways to implement it: Buy…
Pros and Cons of a COTS Solution Applying a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software solution to your business problems is attractive for many reasons, not the least of which is the short implementation cycle compared with custom-built software. No matter your business problem, chances are good that some software vendor somewhere in the world has a…
Pros and Cons of Building Your Software Building custom software to address your unique business problems has the significant advantage of giving you, at least in theory, the exact solution you need—nothing more, nothing less. The major downside: It requires a significant investment in time, money, and resources to pull it off. And there’s a…
