Validating Cross-Impact Analysis in Project Risk Management

Companies work increasingly more on projects as a means of executing organizational decisions. However, too many enterprise projects result in failure. Hence, firms should follow a risk management method that drives their projects toward success. Nevertheless, project managers often deal with risks intuitively. This is partly because they lack the proper means to correctly manage the underlying risks which affect the entire cycle of their projects. Therefore, one purpose is to identify the critical events that managers may encounter before the beginning of the project and during its development. In addition, we propose CIA-ISM to represent existing relationships between the unforeseen events in the project’s lifetime and their key performance indicators. This also predicts the influence of risks on project performance over time by means of scenarios. The tool proposed would thus help practitioners to manage enterprise projects risks in a more effective and proactive way. We have validated the predictive capability of the CIA-ISM model with 22 real projects. The results show a high level of predictive capability in terms of risk analysis and key performance indicators.