Why small projects succeed and big ones don’t

Research shows that small software projects are much more likely to succeed than big ones.

The 2018 Standish Group report studied 50,000 projects and found that small software projects succeed 4 times more often than large ones. In fact, over 85% of big projects failed.

On top of that, big projects tend to fail big as well. An Oxford University study found that 17% of large IT projects fail catastrophically, with budget and schedule blowouts that can bring whole companies to their knees.

Luckily, you don’t need to run these risks. You can still deliver big impacts through small projects.

How to deliver successful projects by keeping them small

To help you have big impacts through small projects, we’ve detailed:

• how and why small projects reduce risk
• project planning and initiation techniques to counter the pressures that generate large projects
• project management techniques that maximise value by minimising project size.

Video: Why humans solve problems by adding not subtracting

It turns out that it’s not surprising that projects tend to get big. That’s because recent research shows that our brains are wired to solve problems by adding not subtracting, according to a paper published in Nature.

Across a series of experiments, a team at the University of Virginia found that we tend to add not subtract, even when subtracting is the better solution.

The researchers point out it’s something we do as a society too. For years we taught kids to ride bikes by adding training wheels. But the way toddlers have taken to balance bikes shows that all we needed to do was remove the pedals.

When asked to make the top platform more stable, test subjects tended to add more pillar support bricks, rather than remove the existing one

Solving problems by simplifying

The research may explain why many people are initially confused by principle 10 of the Agile manifesto: Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential. For many people, maximising the work you don’t do seems wrong. 

If you’ve read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, you might recognise the findings as another example of a cognitive bias. It seems that our fast System 1 brain defaults to solving problems by addition. That means we need to stop and engage our slow System 2 brain. Whenever we have a problem to solve, we need to ask ourselves what we can remove to improve our solution.

View the YouTube video on the research

Badminton is a hit

Badminton is Boost's latest pick for after-work sport.

We found that team sports like netball were heaps of fun, but busy lives made it hard to field a team each week. With badminton, we just book a couple of courts at the Badminton Wellington Centre in Hataitai and pretty much any number of us can bowl on up. 

Plus, any sport that used to be called Battledore and Shuttlecock has got to be good.