All Roads Lead to Burning Rome: Towards a Conceptual Model of IT Project Success

Abstract

Despite the maturity of IT project management in research and practice, a consistent understanding of IT project success (ITPS) and its constituents is still absent. The main objective of this paper is to ascertain the important constructs of ITPS and their interdependencies to overcome the absence of a comprehensive theoretical framework. Based on an initial literature search and six expert interviews, we built and validated a conceptual model consisting of critical success factors, contingency factors, and two success dimensions, whose interdependencies are illustrated by four propositions. Moreover, we extracted 67 critical success factors in ten categories from a structured literature review to harmonize the multitude of success factors stated in literature. The proposed model serves as a starting point for future research, which should focus on the detailed quantitative-empirical investigation of the cause-effect relationships and the contingency factors to validate our propositions and provide a generally accepted theory of ITPS.