100 Things You Should Know to Be a Successful Project Leader. My Life in Failure is a summation of over two decades of work on project failure. The Standish Group has been collecting case information on real-life IT environments and software development projects since 1985. Standish's cumulative research encompasses 20 years of data on why projects succeed or fail, representing more that 50,000 completed IT projects. Note: Updated 17 charts with 2015/2016 data.