I’m spending a lot of time at the moment working with governance groups, steering committee’s and PMO’s to introduce Lean ideas. There’s a common challenge that I keep coming across. First up, size matters. I was going through the 2009 Standish CHAOS report today to gather some data for a presentation. Here’s what they have to say about project size and it’s relationship to success…

• 61% of all successful projects are under US$750,000.
• 80% of all successful projects are under US$3M.
• Projects over US$10M have less than a 2% chance of success.

So, we need to keep things small, breaking projects apart where possible to deliver in small chunks to increase our chances of success.

The tension is that governance groups often prefer to manage one $10M project than lot’s of small ones. This is generally a pattern in large corporates rather than on-line product companies, who have understood this for years, often moving away from project models and towards product models where key products are slowly evolved over time, using the returns they generate to reinvest.

Keep it small. Keep it simple. Software by numbers.