Pat Weaver has a nice post about project failure and the people side of project success. People are necessary of course, but far from sufficient.
Success on non-trivial projects starts and ends with process. This has been shown time and again.
Pat mentions two failures I am familiar with - Hubble (I assume the mirror) and Challenger.
Both the Hubble mirror and Challenger were first PROCESS failures. A read of the mishap reports state this. Then people failures from the absence of process.
Had Hubble followed the process of Operational Test and Evaluation (OT&E) has defined in (NPR) 8705.2A, the mirror would have undergone integration test and evaluation.
Had Thiokol pushed back on the Marshall Space Flight center management and insisted - according to contract - on a Safety and Mission Assurance stand done, the "mishap" would have not occurred.
The right people are necessary but far from sufficient for success.
IT is another world unto its own. No formal engineering discipline, abhorrence of process and procedure and all that "emergent" nonsense on enterprise systems, results in well deserved failure.
We work a 600 million $ software development program, a $300M bioscience program, a $100M helicopter software intensive program.
We're usually over budget and behind schedule, but it is never a surprise in the way an IT $200M right off of ERP typically is.
It's people, process and tools. But it starts and ends with process on all non-trivial projects. People without process is a "beach party." This is lost on most project where they put people first. Establish the process, hire people capable of executing the process as well as executing their technical role and you've got a fighting chance at getting closer to success.
The official US DoD term is "Increasing the Probability of Program Success (PoPS)"
