Re-assessing the importance of necessary or sufficient conditions of critical success factors in IT project success : a fuzzy set theoretic approach

Despite more than fifty years of intensive effort, the issue of IT project failure remains unresolved. It has been suggested that conventional approaches may be misdirecting project management effort and moreover research shows top management support to be of critical importance (e.g. Young and Jordan 2008; Tichy and Bascom 2008). However, existing empirical evidence may have a strong reliance on selective exemplary cases of top management support and they do not account for counterexamples and counterfactuals. This paper lays the foundation for further research to resolve this issue by reassessing the original research using a more systematic approach: fuzzy-set analysis. The main contribution of the paper is methodological. In overcoming the numerical limitation of multiple case study research it provides a standard approach to compare large numbers of case studies. Researchers and practitioners are provided with an approach to compare and reconcile diverse project experiences and unambiguously determine the critical success factors that are the most important for project success.