The following 5 principles lay out the steps you should be following, to make sure that your projects are completed on time, and on budget, successfully.

1) Communicate

 40% of project managers cited poor communication as the leading cause if IT project failures. If everyone involved in your IT project doesn’t know what they’re working on, when it’s due, how to get itdone and who the audience is, how can you possibly expect your project to succeed? All of the other principles that come later on rely on your communication, expectations, goals, resources, deadlines, priorities, reports and budgets all need to be available to your team so that they can do their jobs properly. Yes, communicating all of these things can sometimes be difficult, particularly if it’s a short project with a tight deadline, or half of your team is located overseas. It doesn’t matter. With all of the technology readily available to us today, there is NO excuse for lack of communication. Tools like web-conferencing actually make it possible for your developer in Hyderabad to share his screen with you in New York, to demonstrate how exactly to recreate major bug in your application.

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According to the market research company, Research and Markets, US spending on IT products and services is forecasted to grow to $514.5 billion in 2010. However, the estimated cost of IT failures to the US economy is $1 trillion! Now we’re talking about IT system failures and their net affect on the companies that rely on those systems. But you can bet money on the fact that the institutions and companies experiencing these losses know the IT company who built their system. Furthermore, they’re not going to be buying from that company again, much less recommending it to their partners and contacts. In any company, large or small, your reputation is your biggest asset – you want to be in that 8% group. If your IT projects are failing, then you are not going to win the market share you need to compete in that $514.5 billion market!
The following 5 principles lay out the steps you should be following, to make sure that your projects are completed on time, and on budget, successfully. Read them, learn them, know them, teach them and then make them stick.
Principle One: Communicate
• 40% of project managers cited poor communication as the leading cause if IT project failures
If everyone involved in your IT project doesn’t know what they’re working on, when it’s due, how to get it done and who the audience is, how can you possibly expect your project to succeed?

In software development, an Issue or Bug is a glitch in your software system that causes the program to behave in a way other than designed. Issues can range from the show stopper, a fatal error that causes irreparable damage to your software system, to the very minor glitch. Obviously, each issue in the system is not going to have the same importance, or urgency, attached to it. Critical issues, the show stoppers mentioned above, need to be solved first before you can do anything else. Lower urgency issues are the minor ones, which you or your team can put off until time permits. There are tons of other details, that are relevant to the fate of your software, to keep track of like who experienced the issue (was it a customer or someone within the company), when was the bug found, what exactly was it that the user
experienced (in order to be solved, this needs to be extremely detailed!), what solutions were attempted, and much more.

An issue tracking system or tool will manage and maintain your lists of issues. Organizations commonly use Issue tracking systems in their customer support call centers to create, assign, update, track and resolve reported issues. These issues could come from customers directly, or even from the organization's other (non IT) employees. An issue tracking system will often also contain a knowledge base, which information on each customer, fixes for common problems, and other important and useful data. http://www.elementool.com/ebook/IssueTrackingeBook.pdf