A Risk Management Framework to Increase Success of IT Projects

Abstract

Companies around the globe continually seek to improve the quality of services to realize their primary mission and increase their success, branding, and profit. Based on strategic planning, they compete fiercely in their markets to accomplish a remarkable outcome about their commercial growth. When a company devises a new idea, it is launched to execute it. A project refers to planning and executing structured tasks by qualified personnel with clear goals, a specified schedule and budget, and an initial establishment of controls and indicators to assess the results achieved compared to expected. Here, project management becomes a critical path and tool to ensure success. However, even with project management being common knowledge, many projects still fail to attain their goals for various reasons. Moreover, the challenge is more remarkable for projects in the IT sector since the literature fails to be specific about the type of projects we are executing. For this thesis context, we can define project success as the highest level of adherence to its baseline achieved at any point in time. A project can succeed at the end of a phase but still fail at the completion. We measure a successful project by verifying its scope, resources usage, and schedule according to the updated project baseline. Any derivation can be considered a failure. Another vital point to verify is the client's satisfaction. Our study first determines the gaps between the literature and existing practices and how they affect the projects' success. To this end, we analyze a large amount of data that we gather through an online survey conducted with several companies from different countries and industries. Next, we compare our findings with the literature to identify the main factors influencing projects' failure. Based on this analysis, we propose a new approach to managing risks specifically for IT projects, called RM3, with the sole objective of increasing the success rate of projects and filling the vast gaps in the literature. Furthermore, we demonstrate the RM3's efficiency and e cacy through an action research study within an IT Canadian company. The results are notable and satisfactory compared to the PMBOK and SCRUM-based methodologies that the company has in place. Lastly, the last contribution of our research is to develop a system prototype to support the RM3 framework based on the feedback from the action research study. The main point is to have a simple system to manage and execute the processes described in the proposed approach while keeping in sync the project data with the actual company tools. These well-known market software manage risks superficially. Our research findings will undoubtedly reinforce the idea that new project management practices are indispensable for projects in the IT sector and others and that better risk management is a sure path towards the company's growth and effectiveness of the business.