The champagne is long gone and the blush worn off your project launch. Your project is finally finished. It came in close to on-schedule, nearly on budget, pretty much in scope of the original requirements and exuded other characteristics indicative of project success. Well, consider yourself lucky.

Between 1996 and 1999, the US spent $250-$275 billion each year on IT application development of 175, 000 - 200,000 projects. The Standish Group further qualifies their project statistics with:

• 42% of projects deliver the requirements as originally defined
• 31.3% of projects are canceled before they ever finish
• 52.7% of projects cost 189% of their initial estimate
• only 16.2% of projects finish on time, on budget

The question is - why do some brick-and-mortar companies realize better than projected returns on investment for Information Technology (IT) projects than others? The answer may lie not in the technology implemented, but rather in how the successful companies manage the people side of change.