The November Issue of Communications of the ACM has a article titled "The One-Minute Risk Assessment Tool." They surveyed 720 software projects in 60 large companies. It lists six key risk areas for IT project success, ranked as:
- Use on inappropriate methodology - fit between methodology and type of project (one size does not fit all)
- Lack of customer involvement - user involvement is cheap insurance but perceived as expensive
- Lack of formal project management practices - using well defined patterns and directives to create coordinating interactions
- Dissimilarity to previous projects - if the new project does not resemble an old one then new problems will appear
- Project complexity - technical complexity drives project complexity
- Requirements volatility - building on volatile requirements is problematic without the ability to control the impact on the system architecture
There are other dimensions to these drivers. Type of Risk Driver versus Sphere of Influence that impact a managers ability to mitigate the risk.
If you're not an ACM member, any good university library has this journal on the shelf.
