“Risk management is an essential process for the successful delivery of IT projects” [1]; [2], and “risk management offers genu-ine and significant benefits to organizations, their projects and their stakeholders, but these will never be achieved without recogni-tion of the importance of managing risk at all levels in the business, matched with opera-tional effectiveness in executing risk man-agement in practice” [3].
Effective IT project management has been discussed by academics and practitioners since 1978 [4]. Existing literature discusses several conceptual frameworks for explain-ing different types of IT risks, risk manage-ment strategies and measures of software projects performance [5]; [6]; [7]; [8]; [9]. Risk management is the most important management tool a project manager can use to increase the likelihood of project success. Because risk management is often not used or not understood, those that implement the risk management processes in their projects can have a significant competitive advantage [10].
There are several approaches to risk man-agement in the IT projects literature, and the main ones are: the evaluation approach, the management approach and the contingency approach [11].
Also, the literature is defining project suc-cess [12]: in the traditional, vendor-oriented way, based on time, budget and qual-ity/requirements criteria [13], and in the non-traditional, broadening way, that refers to the concept of project performance using di-mensions like product and process perform-ance [9]; [14]; [15]; [16]; [17].