Lessons learned from the failure of a Minnesota's major e-business healthcare project

Despite substantial progress in project management in the past decades, management of outsourced system development projects remains a major challenge for project managers and sponsors. The rapid growth of e-business in the past decades has created a surge of new development projects to replace the old legacy systems. However, while there are many published studies about in-house development projects, few studies explore outsourced projects, especially those that failed. This paper presents a case study of the failure of the HealthMatch project at the State of Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) from the qualitative systems view. The paper ends with success/failure factors and lessons learned. Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.