Strive for Total Project Success


Vendors have been improving tools for decades, but the Standish Group has documented that only 30 percent of IT projects are judged a success. We believe the reason for this disconnect is that projects are about people, process and collaboration, not tools. Most tools attack a small part of the project life cycle and actually build silos of data that make collaboration more difficult. Therefore, it's important to evaluate tools for more than a narrow set of features and consider their ability to improve teamwork, collaboration, and overall likelihood of success. When project success is the primary benchmark, a unified workspace will always prevail over a single tool.


Having all of a project's critical data in a single repository ensures that everyone is working with the most current version of information. Data is easily linked and traced through the entire project life cycle. Team members don't have to wonder if they will be blind-sided by an issue because they missed an email or meeting. With everything connected, traditional barriers between developers, quality assurance, business analysts, managers and customers fade away. A unified workspace makes a project team more organized, synchronized, accountable, and effective.


Below are just a few examples of the benefits made possible through the use of a workspace of connected tools where data is linked and easily reported upon:

  • A customer can view real-time information on a single project health dashboard rather than having to continuously request or wait for status updates.

  • A project manager can instantly determine whether removing a requirement or approving a change request will impact the testing schedule and how the change will affect the budget and schedule.

  • A business analyst can run an automated report to determine if all requirements have been tested and view which requirements spawned defects and their severity.

  • A quality assurance person can view a real-time report to make sure that no requirements have been changed since their corresponding test cases were written.

  • A developer fixing a defect can simply click a link to view the original requirement that led to the defect as well as all of the comments and discussion that led to the requirement to make sure the defect is correctly resolved.

The benefits cited above provide significant value, but most fail to consider them when evaluating a tool and collaboration suffers. Instead, consider how you will handle the scenarios addressed in the examples above. Recognize the importance of a single source of project truth, the benefits of a synchronized team, and the cost of disconnected tools and data silos. Finally, understand that there is a big difference between a unified project workspace that's built from scratch to work together and a "suite of applications" tied together with a patchwork of fragile integrations and data synchronizations.


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