Exhuming it Projects from Their Graves: An Analysis of Eight Failure Cases and Their Risk Factors
This paper adopts a meta-case analysis approach to study the common risk factors in eight well-documented, high-profile failed IT projects. Each case is reviewed with the intention to tease out salient details such as the organizational context, the rationale for which the IT project were conceived, its intended objectives as well as risk factors that led to its failure. From the analysis, two observations are made. One, risk factors can be classified into four main categories, namely, people-related, process-related, technical and extra-project. Two, risk factors emerged throughout the three main stages in the project lifecycle, namely, initiation, development and implementation. The findings from this paper are synthesized into a model to help IT project managers preempt risk factors in their projects.