5. Discussion
Advocates of the evaluation approach, e.g. Jiang and Klein (1999), Procaccino et al. (2002), Scott and Vessey (2002) and Wallace et al. (2004b), implicitly assume that knowledge of risks means that they can and will be managed, and therefore that the project will be a success. Their strategy is to create a list of relevant risk factors, to rank them in order of importance, and to establish statistical evidence of their impact on project success. Various authors, e.g. Wallace et al. (2004b), have found statistical evidence that risk factors (negatively) influence project success. Han and Huang (2007) focus on risk dimensions and their impact on project success in IT projects. They argue that the risk dimension ‘‘requirements” has a strong negative impact on project success in IT trajectories. The claim that poor requirements are an important cause of project failure is, however, almost trivial in the case of IT projects. Setting time and budget limits and defining requirements take place at the beginning of the project, when uncertainty is at its maximum (Pinto, 2007). Especially in IT projects, it is hard to define the project deliverables at the outset of the project (Turner and Cochrane, 1993). Any changes in the project’s requirements will almost certainly occur during its course; only then will they influence both the budget and the planning. In most cases, the amount of time and money will need to be increased to complete the project. A traditional project success definition will then easily lead to the conclusion that the IT project has failed (see Fig. 6).