The Impact of Effective Risk Management on Project Success

Project success is the satisfaction of stakeholder needs and is measured by the socalled success criteria as identified at the start of the project. The conventional view of project success based on cost, time and quality is no longer sufficient. The main objective of the research work that underpins this paper was to investigate the impact of effective risk management processes on project success. In this paper, two case studies of already executed projects have been considered to analyse the impact of their risk management processes on the project outcome. Project ‘A’ had no visible risk management process implemented therefore all the risks identified at the definition stage occurred during the project execution. Project ‘B’ on the other hand, had some risk management process implemented but the project still overran schedule due to lack of continuity in the risk management. Both projects incurred huge amounts of lost earnings for the organisations due to their schedule overrun. It has been concluded that the cause of the projects failure can be directly related to the extent of risk management undertaken. Besides, the level of risk management process undertaken during a project impacts directly on the success or otherwise of the project. Furthermore, effective risk management should be continuously undertaken throughout the project lifecycle to enhance project success.