What is a death march project? What makes IT organizations create such things? Why would anyone in his right mind agree to participate in such a project?To many grizzled IT veterans, these are rhetorical questions. Everything, in their experience, is a death march project. Why do they happen? Because corporations are insane and, as consultant Richard Sargent commented to me, “Corporate insanity is doing the same thing again and again, and each time expecting different results.” And why do we participate in such projects? Because, as consultant Dave Kleist observed in an e-mail note, “Death march projects are rarely billed as such, and it takes a lot of work when being hired from the outside to discover if your hiring company is prone to creating death march projects.”
Mind-boggling projects— the project has an army of 1,000–2,000 or more (including, in many cases, consultants and subcontractors), and the project is expected to last seven to ten years.