I can know if your complex IT project will succeed!

Draw two identical lines (same length). One (the upper) represents the time invested in applications life cycle and the second (bottom) line the human resources available for your IT organization. On the first line draw a point which represent how much time your organization invest in systems development. Take in account that from the drawing point onward it's a segment that represents the time needed to maintain systems.  Usually the dot will separate the line to quarter and three quarters.

Now, draw a dot on the second (bottom) line which will represent the relative amount of human resources that your IT invested in application's development. Keep in mind that the segment from the point onward represents the relative resources invested in maintaining applications. Usually the first segment is three quarters, which support development and the second segment is one quarter, which supports application maintenance.

Having the dots, which splitting the lines, connect the two dots with a line. There are three types of lines that you should get "Vertical"  (90 angle) line from the upper line to the bottom line,  a diagonal line starting from right to left, and diagonal line starting from left to right. Each one of those lines says a lot about your IT.

Let’s start from the most uncommon scenario; the diagonal line goes from right to left. This implied that relatively more human resources go to maintaining systems rather than for developing them. This line is common for enterprises that are based on cloud computing services. If you’re buying software services rather than developing them, than most of your human resources will be focused on maintaining those applications. This scenario might be the "Best Scenario" that many CIOs are after.

"Vertical line" is also not so common. It imply that your human resources are rational to the time spend on developing or maintaining systems. Sorry to say it but I never saw a company with this type of line.  This might be the ideal situation, but in reality it simply doesn't exist.

The most common scenario is a line starting from left to right, which implies that most of the human  resources goes on developing systems and less resources on maintaining the system (although maintain the  system is a task that last much more time).  This scenario can be seen in most of the enterprises, the only difference is the angle of the diagonal.  The more the angle sharper, the more IT portfolio is less management. In enterprises that fully maintain IT portfolio we expect to see a list of: Supported business capabilities,   Managed Information, applications, Databases, Servers, storage, certain amount of attributes for each collected data (such as Cost, usage, Availability, etc') and relations between them. But, as the angle is sharper less of the IT portfolio management outcomes are available. It can start from missing attributes and relations, through missing some of the assets (such as capabilities and information) and end up with irrelevant list of assets or even unexacting list of assets.

As far as I managed to see (and It’s just what I’ve heard and seen) there is also direct relation between the diagonal angle and the ability of the enterprise to run a complex project in time. Organizations with sharp angle simply tend to fail in complex projects, while organizations with less sharper angle tend to finish complex project on time.