2. Risk management and project success in IT projects
2.1. How risk management is approached
For quite some time now, researchers have had a common interest in the area of risk and uncertainty in IT projects. Early publications include e.g. Alter and Ginzberg (1978), Zmud (1980) and McFarlan (1981), later followed by Boehm (1991), Barki et al. (1993), Charette (1996) and Lyytinen et al. (1996). These authors consider risk management primarily an ex-post evaluation process. The aim of such a process is to list and quantify the risks and find the causes for software project failure. This information is then used in the next project in order to prevent these risks from occurring. Fig. 1 presents this process graphically, showing that: