The success of IT projects is influenced by risk and risk management according to the existing project management literature. The paper emphasizes the role of risk management and its contribution to projects success in the existing literature. The methodology applied is based on documentary study review and analysis of the concepts used by the literature. We analyzed the literature published between 1978 and 2012 from the main IT project management jour-nals and publications. The results are that risk management is a very important component of the project management process and it is assumed implicitly to work in favour of project suc-cess. We also performed a quantitative analysis of how risk management processes affect the subjective and objective performance of IT projects in Romanian IT companies.