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IT Governance and Project
Management Survey Results
from the
July 2009 DDJ State of the IT Union
Survey
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This survey was performed the last week of June and the
first week of July 2009 and there was 125 respondents. The survey
was announced in my June 2009 DDJ newsletter,
RFPs the Agile Way, and in
Jon Erickson's blog.
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The survey results are summarized in my July 2009 Agile Update entitled
Lies, Great Lies, and Software Development Project Plans and my upcoming August 2009
newsletter (it's focus will be on
IT governance issues such as development guidelines).
Some findings include:
- 76% that they had development teams which had adopted agile techniques.
- Of the organizations that have adopted agile techniques, on average 44%
of their projects are applying agile techniques
- 79% of development teams need to provide initial cost estimates,
although only 61% of teams track their actuals against their estimates
- On average initial estimates needed to be +/- 11% although actual
results were +/- 19% on average
- To keep the actuals close to the original estimates, many teams applies
rather questionable management "best practices" to do so, see
Lies, Great Lies, and Software Development Project Plans
- 59% of respondents indicated that their organization has enterprise-wide
coding conventions, 47% have enterprise-wide UI/usability
conventions, and 51% have enterprise-wide data conventions. But, as you see
in Figure 1, just because the conventions exist
doesn't mean that people are actually following them (similar trends apply
for UI and data conventions, see the downloads).
- Figure 2 indicates the perception regarding
relationship between development teams and their organization's data group.
- Figure 3 indicates the perceived effectiveness of
the IT governance programs within the respondent's organization
Figure 1. Development team's approach to following
coding conventions.
Figure 2. Perceived relationship between development
teams and data groups.
Figure 3. Perceived effectiveness of IT governance
programs.
You may use this data
as you see fit, but may not sell it in whole or in part.
You may publish summaries of the findings, but if you do
so you must reference the survey accordingly (include
the name and the URL to this page). Feel free to
contact me
with questions. Better yet, if you publish,
please let me know so I can link to your work.
-
I was disappointed with the low number of respondents. I suspect that
the timing of the survey, I sent it out in late June when many North
Americans and Europeans are on summer vacation, had an impact
- The agile adoption rate of 76% is likely high due to the fact that we
announced the survey via my monthly Agile newsletter.
- People didn't know the purpose of the survey, so that likely removed
some bias.
- This survey suffers from the
fundamental challenges faced by all surveys.
Links to Other Articles/Surveys
- My other surveys
Why Share This Much Information?
I'm sharing the results, and in particular the source data, of my surveys for
several reasons:
- Other people can do a much better job of analysis than I can. If
they publish online, I am more than happy to include links to their
articles/papers.
- Once I've published my column summarizing the data in DDJ, I really
don't have any reason not to share the information.
- Too many traditionalists out there like to use the "where's
the proof" question as an excuse not to adopt agile techniques. By
providing some evidence that a wide range of organizations seem to be
adopting these techniques maybe we can get them to rethink things a bit.
- I think that it's a good thing to do and I invite others to do the same.
