Risk Factors in Vendor-Driven IT Projects

There is strong ‘official’ sanction in the IT literature for the use of formal risk management processes for IT projects but there is a confused picture of their application in practice. While many potential risk factors for IT projects have been identified, we know less about which factors are actually attended to by project managers in the course of managing their projects, and little is known about which factors apply in different project contexts, such as in-house or out-sourced development, or package implementation projects. This paper reports on an in-depth exploratory investigation of vendor IT project managers in Hong Kong, and the key risk factors they attend to during software package implementation projects. A number of new context-specific risk factors are identified, and particular risks that are difficult to manage or anticipate are highlighted.