Early Warning Signs of it Project Failure: The Dominant Dozen

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

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

[3]  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..

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

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

[6]  David Loader,et al.  Against the Gods , 2002 .

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

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

[9]  Ray Kurzweil,et al.  Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever , 2004 .

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

[11]  Joe Saur.  Review of “Professional Software Development: Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, Enhanced by Steve McConnell.” Addison Wesley 2004 , 2003, SOEN.

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

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

[14]  Barry W. Boehm,et al.  Software Risk Management , 1989, ESEC.

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

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

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

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

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