A cross-culture study of risk management in software projects

Prior literature suggests that an adequate assessment of software project risk is a major source of problems in IS development projects. A systematic and rigorous procedure to identify the risks is the first step of the risk assessment. An authoritative list of risk factors is one of the most useful strategies to identify the risks and to go further of the study and theory development. However most of the published lists are too old and vary too much in their level of detail and scope. This paper used a Delphi survey to provide an updated and practical list of common risk factors. This list was based on the responses of a multicultural set of Chinese and Canadian project managers in software projects. We also had them ranked those risk factors according to their professional experiences. This multicultural study will not only help the Chinese software industry to develop more healthy and speedy, but also, it will help the Canadians to understand more about Chinese software industry. It is very interesting to compare our findings with the previous list from the literature. We compared and analyzed the risk factors and the ranking obtained in this paper with published lists, we also compared and analyzed the results between the two countries. Finally we concluded that this study has several implications for software risk management and further research.