Staff reductions within and outside of IT departments are also adversely affecting project success rates. With project managers and business stakeholders taking on more work due to layoffs, they have less time to devote to each project, to go to meetings, to help with requirements planning and to do all the other activities that promote project success, says Johnson.

Finally, the recession has engendered a risk aversion inside organizations that Johnson says has led them to overemphasize compliance and governance--to such an extent that too many checks and balances are slowing down projects.

And the longer a project takes, he adds, the more likely it is to fail.

"When a project is initiated, it has a certain business value," says Johnson. "The business value can only be realized when the project is completed. If you add layers of red tape that cause the project to stall, it's not [going to be perceived as] important. Too much governance and compliance bogs down projects. They don't move forward fast enough to realize the business value."

The end result of too much governance is a project that takes so long that stakeholders lose interest and eventually decide to cancel it, or a project that eventually gets delivered but doesn't get used because it's no longer relevant to the business, he says. In both situations, the project is considered a failure.

Despite the rise in IT project failures, Johnson says the cost and time overruns aren't as bad they've been in the past.

"When we look at challenged projects, we're seeing fewer overruns, and the waste to value ratio didn't look too bad even given all the cancellations," he says.

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