The Role and the Effects of Risk Management in IT Projects Success

Abstract

The success of IT is influenced by and management according to the existing project management literature. The paper emphasizes the role of management and its contribution to success in the existing literature. The methodology applied is based on documentary study review and analysis of the concepts used by the literature. We analyzed the literature published between 1978 and 2012 from the main IT project management jour-nals and publications. The results are that management is a very important component of the project management process and it is assumed implicitly to work in favour of project suc-cess. We also performed a quantitative analysis of how management processes affect the subjective and objective performance of IT in Romanian IT companies.Keywords: Project Risk Management, IT Projects, Project Success, Project Performance1 IntroductionRisk management is an essential process for the successful delivery of IT projects [1]; [2], and risk management offers genu-ine and significant benefits to organizations, their and their stakeholders, but these will never be achieved without recogni-tion of the importance of managing at all levels in the business, matched with opera-tional effectiveness in executing man-agement in practice [3].Effective IT project management has been discussed by academics and practitioners since 1978 [4]. Existing literature discusses several conceptual frameworks for explain-ing different types of IT risks, manage-ment strategies and measures of software performance [5]; [6]; [7]; [8]; [9]. Risk management is the most important management tool a project manager can use to increase the likelihood of project success. Because management is often not used or not understood, those that implement the management processes in their can have a significant competitive advantage [10].There are several approaches to management in the IT literature, and the main ones are: the evaluation approach, the management approach and the contingency approach [11].Also, the literature is defining project success [12]: in the traditional, vendor-oriented way, based on time, budget and qual-ity/requirements criteria [13], and in the non-traditional, broadening way, that refers to the concept of project performance using di-mensions like product and process perform-ance [9]; [14]; [15]; [16]; [17].2 Research MethodologyResearch problems(1) A documentary study and analysis of the management related concepts used in the literature.(2) Also, we propose an analysis of the role and the effects of management on the success of IT projects.Research designThe research methodology consisted of two stages:* The analysis of literature related to management in IT from 1978 to 2012 in several publications and journals, including: International Journal of Project Management, Project Management Jour-nal, International Journal of Information Management, The Journal of Systems and Software, Journal of Management Infor-mation Systems, having as research items: management and IT projects.* Applying an online questionnaire in Ro-manian IT companies with questions about how the project managers perform management in IT and how the most recent completed IT project turned out.Sample, population or subjectsThe target population for the empirical analysis consisted of project managers, IT managers and IT analysts in Romanian IT companies, and the sample was derived from a combination of the convenience method and the snow-ball method on a 361 company database between the 10th of June 2012 and the 11th of July 2012.We received 108 answers (28.35%), out of which we validated 106, from 72 companies (19.95%).Instrumentation and materialsThe questionnaire was developed in Google-Docs and the data were processed using Mi-crosoft@ Excel 2007 and IBM@ SPSS 19. …