Organizations that depend on the use of IT in their business models must maintain their systems and keep their systems current to survive (Filipek, 2008; Kulkarni, Kumar, Mookerjee, & Sethi, 2009; Unterkalmsteiner et al., 2012). As most IT departments allocate as much as 80% of their budget to maintain stability while leaving only the other 20% to allow improvements (Telea et al., 2010), high cost of stability may be a reason many IT organizations cannot afford efficient staffing and even jeopardize the existence of the organization (Filipek, 2008; Talib, Abdullah, Atan, & Murad, 2010). The purpose of this exploratory mixed methods study was to discover the IT programming standards used in IT departments that predict a decrease in project maintenance costs. This study employed an exploratory mixed methods data collection and analysis to develop and test a collection of universal programming standards. The qualitative portion of the study resulted in a list of IT programming standards from the Fortune 20 companies of 2011. Surveyed from IT departments in the Fortune 500 companies of 2011, the quantitative portion of this study correlate the degree of enforcement of each IT programming standard to a decrease in average project maintenance costs using a backward stepwise regression. Using a 95% confidence interval and a 5% margin of error (a = 0.05), the backward stepwise regression discarded 18 of the 22 IT programming standards. The remaining correlations give evidence that a) the more the department enforces waiting for feedback the higher the maintenance costs, b) the more the department enforces having the architectural team develop coding guidelines the lower the maintenance costs, and c) the more the IT department enforces the following of change management procedures, the higher the maintenance costs. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]