Your IT project is toast when...

TechRepublic has a top 10 of signs indicating that your IT project is about to get cut. The top 10 highlights how projects can run amok and chances are you may have lived through a few of these management woes.

Among the more notable lessons in the list:

People leave: Two of the top reasons a project is about to get the boot is that project sponsors and managers change. This item is a fact of life given that the average tenure of a CIO is about 3 years or so. The turnover issue is another reason that projects are short these days. Big bang projects are largely extinct because a) the ROI is hard to show and b) the people that start them split.

Money: The company can struggle or the business may just get sick of throwing dough into the IT pit. After a few months companies realize they are in an IT hole and have to stop digging. The pit develops because managers can't get all the corporate ducks--process, people and change management--in a row.

Leadership stinks: A bunch of the lessons in the top 10 list touch on this issue. Managers get gun-shy and lose that initial enthusiasm; politics takes over and the folks that run a project don't have a clue.