Early Warning Signs of it Project Failure: The Dominant Dozen

Abstract The postmortem examination of failed IT projects reveals that long before the failure there were significant symptoms or “early warning signs.” This article describes the top 12 people-related and project-related IT project risks, based on “early warning sign” data collected from a panel of 19 experts and a survey of 55 IT project managers.

[1]  Mark Keil,et al.  How Software Project Risk Affects Project Performance: An Investigation of the Dimensions of Risk and an Exploratory Model , 2004, Decis. Sci..

[2]  Martina McGuinness,et al.  Against The Gods , 1999 .

[3]  S. R. Jammalamadaka,et al.  Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk , 1999 .

[4]  Amrit Tiwana,et al.  The one-minute risk assessment tool , 2004, CACM.

[5]  Capers Jones,et al.  Patterns of software system failure and success , 1996 .

[6]  B. Boehm.  Software risk management: principles and practices , 1991, IEEE Software.

[7]  T. M. Rajkumar,et al.  Early Indicators of Troubled IS Development Projects , 2004, AMCIS.

[8]  Tom DeMarco,et al.  Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects , 2003 .

[9]  James J. Jiang,et al.  A Measure of Software Development Risk , 2002 .

[10]  Thomas B. L. Kirkwood.  Fantastic voyage: Live long enough to live forever , 2005 .

[11]  Edward Edward Yourdon,et al.  Death March: The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving Mission Impossible Projects , 1999 .

[12]  F. W. McFarlan,et al.  Portfolio approach to information systems , 1989 .

[13]  J. T. Lochner.  The Journal of Defense Software Engineering , 1999 .

[14]  Kalle Lyytinen,et al.  Identifying Software Project Risks: An International Delphi Study , 2001, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[15]  Capers Jones,et al.  Software Project Management Practices: Failure Versus Success © , 2004 .

[16]  Suzanne Rivard,et al.  An Integrative Contingency Model of Software Project Risk Management , 2001, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[17]  Lorin J. May.  Major Causes of Software Project Failures , 2007 .