IT Project Failures?

This post is from from my other blog here

My buddy Alec the Geek often makes very sensible and considered posts that get me thinking. Other times he just says stuff that I agree with because it is so simply obvious (and thus it is ridiculous that there should exist a need to comment at all). Thus Alec's recent post on Software development the Gordon Ramsay way got my head nodding in agreement and then got me cross that such basic concepts still seem so foreign to builders of software.I continue to be amazed of how many places just do not have the basic principles and practices of software development in place. Collectively we have killed forests of trees and wasted centuries of time writing systems development methodologies, software engineering standards, even a Software Engineering Body of Knowledge. Yet still we have the same poor practices and lack of discipline that often makes our industry look like a badly organised team of chimpanzees. Michael Krigsman cites a litany of examples over at his IT Project Failures blog. Almost without exception, each example shows how the failed project did not follow accepted and documented best practice.It is very strange to me that one definition of insanity (attributed to Albert Einstein) is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". What does this say about the IT industry?By Carruthers via Aide-mémoire