Uncovering the Causes of Information System Project Failure

A large amount of information system (IS) projects continue to fail. While scholars have dedicated great effort to investigating success factors in projects in general, less attention has been paid to failure factors, in IS projects in particular. We identify a comprehensive set of factors that led to failure of real-life IS projects by using non-scientific search engines to include a high diversity of reports in our analysis. The results yield a consolidated list of 65 failure factors (grouped in 13 categories), responsible stakeholders, and affected failure dimensions. Practitioners can use this overview by identifying failure factors critical for specific stakeholders in concrete projects. Depending on the relevance of failure dimensions, specific factors can be emphasized or degraded. Researchers are provided with a broad set of factors and can base further inquiries on our overview, for instance, in-depth analyses of specific factors’ impact on project failure.

[1]  Heidi Winklhofer,et al.  Organizational change as a contributing factor to IS failure , 2001, Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[2]  Weidong Xia,et al.  Grasping the complexity of IS development projects , 2004, CACM.

[3]  Hong Liu,et al.  Analysis failure factors for small & medium software projects based on PLS method , 2010, 2010 2nd IEEE International Conference on Information Management and Engineering.

[4]  Judy E. Scott,et al.  Implementing Enterprise Resource Planning Systems: The Role of Learning from Failure , 2000, Inf. Syst. Frontiers.

[5]  Magne Jørgensen,et al.  Failure factors of small software projects at a global outsourcing marketplace , 2014, J. Syst. Softw..

[6]  Devi Jankowicz,et al.  The Easy Guide to Repertory Grids , 2003 .

[7]  Leon A. Kappelman,et al.  Early Warning Signs of it Project Failure: The Dominant Dozen , 2006, Inf. Syst. Manag..

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

[9]  N. Shafiq,et al.  Early Warning Signs of Project Failure , 2018 .

[10]  Varun Grover,et al.  The Impact of Influence Tactics in Information System Development Projects: A Control-Loss Perspective , 2013, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[11]  Kieran Conboy,et al.  Project failure en masse: a study of loose budgetary control in ISD projects , 2010, Eur. J. Inf. Syst..

[12]  Dirk Basten,et al.  Eliminating Failure by Learning from It - Systematic Review of IS Project Failure , 2013, ICIS.

[13]  R. Ryan Nelson,et al.  IT Project Management: Infamous Failures, Classic Mistakes, and Best Practices , 2007, MIS Q. Executive.

[14]  Charlie B. Daniels,et al.  Complexity as a Cause of Failure in Information Technology Project Management , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on System of Systems Engineering.

[15]  Amrit Tiwana,et al.  Control in Internal and Outsourced Software Projects , 2009, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[16]  Lili Marziana Abdullah,et al.  Exploratory case study research: Outsourced project failure , 2012, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[17]  Chris Sauer,et al.  Fit, failure, and the house of horrors: toward a configurational theory of IS project failure , 1997, ICIS '97.

[18]  Terry Cooke-Davies,et al.  The “real” success factors on projects , 2002 .

[19]  Evelina Ericsson,et al.  Quantifying Success Factors for IT Projects—An Expert-Based Bayesian Model , 2014, Inf. Syst. Manag..

[20]  June M. Verner,et al.  Why did your project fail? , 2009, Commun. ACM.

[21]  Lili Marziana Abdullah,et al.  Outsourced strategic IT systems development risk , 2009, 2009 Third International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science.

[22]  Robert L. Glass,et al.  The Standish report: does it really describe a software crisis? , 2006, CACM.

[23]  Shan Ling Pan,et al.  Information Systems implementation failure: Insights from prism , 2008, Int. J. Inf. Manag..

[24]  Jane P. Laudon,et al.  Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm , 2010 .

[25]  Helga Drummond,et al.  Are we any closer to the end? Escalation and the case of Taurus 1 1 This paper reports part of a lar , 1999 .

[26]  K. T. Yeo,et al.  Critical failure factors in information system projects , 2002 .