Furthermore, it would be interesting to combine the relation found by Cooke-Davies (2000) between risk management planning and a timely delivery of the project with the work of Weick and Sutcliffe (2007), who discuss awareness creation and attention shaping as conditions for stakeholder
behaviour in uncertain situations. In this view, risk management contributes to project success, because the stakeholders are aware of the fact that there are risks, on the basis of which they adjust their expectations and behaviour accordingly.
And finally, the majority of publications that relate risk management to project success refer to the traditional time–budget–requirements definition of project success. However, this approach is not in line with the view presented by other literature that project success entails more than just meeting time and budget constraints and requirements. Project stakeholders may use various project success definitions (Agarwal and Rathod, 2006). Therefore, the contribution of risk management should be considered in relation to a broader definition of project success.
Future research may aim at finding answers to the questions whether and how risk management contributes to IT project success. In the meantime, based on the empirical evidence
presented so far we conclude that the fact that project management practitioners pay attention to project risks is likely to have more impact on IT project success than following the steps prescribed in the risk management process.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Philip Powell from the University of Bath and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.