If I had a dollar for every time a potential client told me how easy web development is, or asked me to estimate the re-development of a Facebook-like website after a ten minute phone call I could travel around the world for a couple months. It it was easy to estimate and develop web applications (or any IT project for that matter) over 60% of projects wouldn't fail.

For those of you familiar with a traditional project management process, you’re probably familiar with a typical project lifecycle- plan, budget, design, develop, test and release. You may be less familiar with the percentage of projects that utilize this management process, yet fail to stay within the project’s intended timeline, budget and scope.

According to the “Chaos Report”, a project management study on software development companies: