Introduction

We get asked all the time, "What does the acronym CHAOS mean?" Sorry, you're not going to learn it here. Only a few people at The Standish Group and any one of the 360 people who received and saved the T-shirts we gave out after they completed the first survey in 1994 know what the CHAOS letters represent. Many people have tried to guess. One person thought they stood for "Calling Hallelujah Always Offends Someone."

The results of our CHAOS research are the most widely quoted statistics in the IT industry. Herein, The Standish Group presents nine years of research on why projects succeed or fail. This report details the results of over 40,000 completed IT projects, 400 plus workshops, focus groups and project group therapy sessions. The body of The Standish Group's CHAOS research is the largest continuous research study conducted in the history of information technology.

There are so many research events that occurred during these past nine years that it is both hard to remember them all and too numerous to list. In CHAOS Chronicles Version 3.0 we highlight a selected few. Since we began our CHAOS research in 1994, every spring The Standish Group conducts focus groups concentrating on the subject of project success and failure. These focus groups span six United States cities over a one-month timeframe. Each year, approximately 60 CIOs from major corporations participate. We've also conducted four major surveys during those years. Now our surveys are online and we continually accumulate data on an ongoing basis.

Since 1995 we've hosted CHAOS University with corporate sponsors. Each fall, approximately 60 CIOs from major companies throughout the world convene at this executive retreat. Here, we run five workshops with six groups of ten people. Each group works on the same issues, and at the end of each workshop a spokesperson for each group presents the results. Included in the workshops are project case studies and subject presentations. Often times, workshop subjects are discussed well into the events of the evening.

Other CHAOS events include special workshops at other conferences, one-day workshops in the United States and Europe and the ever-popular "Project Group Therapy" sessions. A Project Group Therapy session focuses on an individual company's project. We conduct a focus group with the project's major stakeholders, users, executive sponsors, project managers and IT people.

All the data and information on project success and failure in this 19 chapter report is from our own primary research. No secondary research was used.

"Creating CHAOS" is the title of our first chapter. We begin it with the first CHAOS articles, explain how the initial research was conducted, and provide the first level of detail on why projects fail. This chapter was developed from three major sources: Failure Is Its Own Reward (1994), the CHAOS reports published from 1994 to 2002, and FocusIT (2001).

In Chapter II, titled "Cobb's Paradox", we delve deeper into the reasons for project failure. The major inputs for this chapter are: Martin Cobb's presentation at CHAOS University in 1995; Unfinished Voyages (1996); The Swiss Stock Exchange's Unified Electronic Trading System case study; Beverly Healthcare Accounts Receivable System case study; and a new case study of the Atlantic Blue Cross Mainframe Migration Project published in a 2002 research note. The next 10 chapters will focus on the latest CHAOS success factors.