The Standish Group has been tracking software project outcomes for over two decades. Their findings have remained stubbornly consistent: the average enterprise software project runs 45% over its original timeline. Nearly one in five is abandoned entirely before completion.
Most vendors will tell you this is the nature of complex software. That timelines are unpredictable. That requirements change. That these things happen.
We disagree. After delivering mission-critical systems for enterprise organizations, defense clients, and high-growth technology companies, we've found that software delays are almost never caused by the complexity of the problem. They're caused by the process used to solve it.
This is what we changed — and why our projects consistently deliver in half the time the industry considers standard.
Where Time Actually Goes
There's a widespread misconception about where software development time is spent. Most stakeholders imagine engineers sitting at keyboards, writing code. When that code takes longer to materialize than expected, the assumption is that the technical problem was harder than anticipated.
The reality is different. Development — the act of writing production code — is rarely where projects derail. The delays accumulate in the phases that precede it.
Consider a typical enterprise software engagement at a conventional firm. A client comes in with a set of requirements. There are several kickoff meetings. A rough architecture is sketched. Development begins. Midway through the first sprint, a senior engineer realizes the database schema they chose won't support a critical feature. The design changes. Weeks of work are partially rebuilt. A new integration requirement surfaces from a stakeholder who wasn't in the original meetings. The scope shifts. Timelines extend.
None of this is caused by the engineering being hard. It's caused by decisions that should have been made at the beginning being deferred until they became expensive problems.
The breakdown looks roughly like this in a conventional engagement:
| Phase | Conventional Timeline | Trust Group Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery & Requirements | 1–2 weeks (shallow) | 2–3 weeks (deep, exhaustive) |
| Architecture & Design | Done informally during sprints | 2–3 weeks (full system design before code) |
| Development | 70% of project time | 50% of project time |
| Rework & Revision | 25–35% of development time | Under 8% |
| QA & Launch | Compressed, stressful | Planned from day one |
The math is straightforward. Front-loading the thinking compresses everything that follows.
The Architecture-First Method
We operate on a principle borrowed from aerospace and defense engineering: design the full system before writing production code.
This sounds obvious. In practice, most commercial software teams don't do it. The "agile" philosophy — interpreted loosely by most organizations as "figure it out as you go" — has convinced an entire industry that planning is overhead. That speed comes from starting immediately. That iteration is free.
It isn't. Iteration at the code level is expensive. Iteration at the design level is nearly free.
Our discovery and design phases are intensive by design. They include:
Technical Discovery (Weeks 1–2)
We conduct stakeholder interviews with everyone whose workflow the system will touch — not just the project sponsor. We audit existing infrastructure for integration constraints, data residency requirements, and security posture. We map every edge case we can identify before a line of code exists.
The output is a complete picture of the problem space. Not a requirements document that will change six times. A shared, specific understanding of what "done" means.
System Design Document (Weeks 2–4)
Before development begins, we produce a full system design document covering: data architecture, API contracts, third-party integration points, security model, scalability assumptions, and failure modes.
This document functions as a contract. When it's approved by the client, it eliminates an entire category of mid-development surprises — the kind that produce scope creep, timeline extensions, and the uncomfortable conversations that follow.
Pre-Built QA Criteria
Most teams write tests after they write code. We define success criteria during the design phase and build QA frameworks before development begins. This means that when a feature is complete, it's immediately testable against pre-agreed standards — not held up while engineers figure out what "working" is supposed to look like.
The result: rework drops from an industry-average 25–35% of development time to under 8% on our engagements.
Dedicated Teams Change Everything
Architecture is one half of the equation. The other is focus.
Context switching is one of the most underestimated costs in software development. Research in cognitive science has consistently shown that switching between complex tasks carries a significant mental cost — estimates suggest it can consume 20–40% of productive capacity. For engineering work, which requires sustained deep concentration, the effect is even more pronounced.
Most software firms run their engineers across multiple client projects simultaneously. An engineer working on three projects isn't delivering 33% of their capacity to each. They're delivering something closer to 25% — the rest evaporates in the transitions, the catching-up, the mental overhead of context-loading.
We assign dedicated engineering teams to each engagement. One project. Full focus. The implications are significant:
- Decision cycles that would take days in a distributed team take hours
- No "let me get back up to speed" tax at the start of each work session
- Problems that surface get solved immediately rather than queued behind other clients' emergencies
- The team develops a deep, intuitive familiarity with the system they're building — which accelerates the later stages of development considerably
This is not a luxury we offer premium clients. It's the standard operating model. It's also one of the primary reasons our timelines look different from those of our peers.
What This Means in Practice
To be concrete about what this methodology produces:
Small projects — a customer-facing application, an internal workflow tool, a mobile product — are typically completed in 6–8 weeks from the start of discovery. The industry standard for comparable scope is 3–4 months.
Enterprise systems — multi-integration platforms, healthcare management systems, AI-powered analytics infrastructure — are delivered in 3–6 months. Comparable engagements at conventional firms routinely run 9–18 months, with significant rework phases embedded in that timeline.
These aren't optimistic estimates. They're the outcome of a process designed specifically to eliminate the variables that cause delays.
We provide a detailed, milestone-by-milestone timeline at the end of the discovery phase. Clients know what will be delivered, when, and what it will look like. Mid-project surprises don't disappear entirely — software is still a human endeavor — but they're rare, and they're handled with processes already in place for exactly that scenario.
The Questions You Should Be Asking Your Vendor
If you're evaluating software development partners for a mission-critical project, timeline reliability should be a central criterion. Here are the questions that separate disciplined engineering firms from the rest:
"Walk me through your design phase before development begins." A firm without a rigorous pre-development architecture process will struggle to answer this specifically. Vague answers about "sprints" and "agile methodology" are not answers.
"How do you handle mid-project scope changes?" Every firm will face them. The question is whether they have a formal process — or whether they handle it informally and absorb the cost in timeline slippage.
"How are your engineers allocated across client projects?" If the answer is that engineers work across multiple simultaneous client engagements, factor that into your timeline expectations.
"Can you show me the system design document from a previous engagement?" (Under NDA if necessary.) A firm that produces thorough pre-development design documents will have them to show. A firm that doesn't produce them won't.
"What does your QA process look like, and when does it start?" Quality assurance that begins at the design phase produces fundamentally different outcomes than QA that begins after development is complete.
A Note on Mission-Critical Systems
Everything above applies to commercial software. For defense, intelligence, and other mission-critical applications, the stakes of timeline slippage and quality compromise are considerably higher.
Our work in defense and intelligence has been built on the same methodology — with additional layers of security architecture, compliance verification, and redundancy planning layered in from the beginning. The architecture-first approach is, frankly, standard in aerospace and defense engineering. It's where we borrowed it from.
The gap between defense-grade engineering practices and what the commercial software industry considers normal is wider than most clients realize. Closing that gap is one of the reasons organizations with high-stakes requirements choose to work with us.
Closing
If your last software project ran over schedule, it wasn't bad luck. It was a process problem — and process problems have solutions.
We've spent years refining an approach that removes timeline variability as a significant risk factor. If you're evaluating partners for a mission-critical build — whether that's an enterprise platform, an AI system, or infrastructure that your organization's operations will depend on — we'd welcome the opportunity to walk you through exactly how we'd approach your project.
Ready to build something that ships on time?
If you're evaluating partners for a mission-critical build — whether that's an enterprise platform, an AI system, or infrastructure your organization depends on — we'd welcome the opportunity to walk you through exactly how we'd approach your project.
Request a Private Briefing →The Trust Group builds mission-critical systems for enterprise organizations, defense clients, and technology companies. Learn more about our capabilities or view selected work.