The cost of achieving user acceptance for an average software development project is an established specter in the career paths of development managers and CIOs nation-wide. Despite aggressive attempts to mitigate the financial burden with offshore labor markets, many experienced development managers will tell you that involving offshore resources puts upward pressure on the cost of acceptance due to higher failure rates.

While the offshore factor is gaining a momentum as a scapegoat for software project failure, this problem persisted well before the first shovel broke ground at International Tech Park Bangalore, and it continues to evade project budgets and schedules regardless of where your code is developed.

Rather than getting into ‘why’, as there are too many culprits to probe in lieu of writing several dissertations, a short blog post is better suited for considering the implications of 'who?' and ‘when?’.

Let’s start with the backdrop of some broadly circulated industry statistics:

• 52% of projects cost nearly 200% of their original estimate
• Average schedule overruns approach 100%
• 40% of delivered projects fail to achieve user acceptance or their business case within 1 year of going live
• 33% of all projects are cancelled before completion or within the first year of going live
• 75% of delivered projects are considered operational failures, with support costs dwarfing original estimates

Assuming your project beats the odds by being on budget and on schedule, you are still facing a 40% chance of failing to achieve your business case within the first year, and a 33% chance of failing outright.

Given slightly better odds at the sports book in Las Vegas, the multi-million dollar question is ‘how much less money might your organization risk if it decided user acceptance was a pre-requisite to ramping up for full-blown development of any production system?’ In other words, what is the value of bringing everyone along for the ride, every time, in the face of such dismal odds?

What if a development manager took her phase 1 budget for a project and used to it to build 2-3 rapid POCs using different resources against the same set of requirements? What if all the time and money typically invested up front in scalability, security, and long term support concerns was allocated only after your business said with certainty; ‘This is exactly what we need to be successful!’?

Using a 5 million dollar project budget as a basis, utilizing the right resource mix for developing a robust POC should cost no more than 150K. You could get it wrong twice, or even all three times for 5-15% of your total budget. The important distinction would be all the knowledge gained from getting it wrong 2 or 3 times, with 85% of your budget in tact. For more ambitious endeavors, you could even use POC contests to evaluate vendors against each other.

This is great news for frustrated business leaders and those of us who live to build successful software. Thanks to rapid proliferation of web services architecture paired with mega strides in UI-layer technologies (e.g. AIR, WPF, and Flex), teams of 2-3 people and 4-8 weeks are all you will need to interact with your requirements, using your data. Though you may not be able to use the system until all of its production considerations are specified and implemented, you will have confidence that your IT partner is spending those dollars on a system that will work for you.

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Will Determan joined Factor_UE as the Accounts Director in February of 2006. Will brings the experience of a diverse technical background in development of large eCommerce and enterprise business applications. His efforts in varying project roles have been recognized with awards for project excellence in speed, client service, and business system innovation.

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