Archive for Juli 26th, 2012

Success Factors in IT Projects (Fortune & White 2006 and Nasir & Sahibuddin 2011)

Donnerstag, Juli 26th, 2012

Fortune, J. & White, D., 2006. Framing of project critical success factors by a systems model. International Journal of Project Management, 24(1), pp.53-65. Available at: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0263786305000876.

Nasir, N.H.M. & Sahibuddin, S., 2011. Critical success factors for software projects : A comparative study. Scientific Research and Essays, 6(10), pp.2174-2186.

I have come across many bits of work in progress now that try to make a selection of what are the success factors in IT projects. Well, these two articles of note publish a fairly comprehensive literature review that spans the plethora of studies on this topic. Fortune & White reviewed 63 articles in total, Nasir & Sahibuddin 43. The first one includes also reviews of hard to find conference papers and case studies that have not made it on the web yet, so the details of some of these studies are hard to verify.

Here is a google spreadsheet with the key comparison between what are the success factors in both reviews ordered by the amount of evidence the authors found to support each factor.

Link to the spreadsheet

Research Featured in Harvard Business Review

Donnerstag, Juli 26th, 2012

After 2 years of researching ICT projects the on-going research has been picked up by the Harvard Business Review and is on the cover of their September 2011 issue.

„Why your IT projects may be riskier than you think?“

By now, I collected a database of nearly 1,500 IT projects – in short we argue that the numbers in the hotly debated Standish Report are wrong, but their critics don’t get it quite right either. We found that while IT projects perform reasonably well on average the risk distribution has very fat tails in which a lot of Black Swan Events hide. 1 in 6 IT projects turned into a Black Swan – an event that can take down companies and cost executives their jobs.

Enjoy the read!

More background reading on the HBR article can be found in this working paper.