Understanding software project risk - a cluster analysis (Wallace et al., 2004)
Wallace, Linda; Keil, Mark; Rai, Arun: Understanding software project risk - a cluster analysis; in: Information & Management, Vol. 42 (2004), pp. 115–125.
Wallace et al. conducted a survey among 507 software project managers worldwide. They tested a vast set of risks and tried to group these risks into 3 clusters of projects: high, medium, and low risk projects.
The authors assumed 6 dimensions of software project risks -
- Team risk - turnover of staff, ramp-up time; lack of knowledge, cooperation, and motivation
- Organisational environment risk - politics, stability of organisation, management support
- Requirement risk - changes in requirements, incorrect and unclear requirements, and ambiguity
- Planning and control risk - unrealistic budgets, schedules; lack of visible milestones
- User risk - lack of user involvement, resistance by users
- Complexity risk - new technology, automating complex processes, tight coupling
Wallace et al. showed two interesting findings. Firstly, the overall project risk is directly correlated to the project performance - the higher the risk the lower the performance! Secondly, they found that even low risk projects have a high complexity risk.