A Taxonomy of an IT Project Failure: Root Causes

This article explores the root causes of IT projects failure of various IT application domains. The primary focus is to address the various issues responsible for IT projects failure to understand the root causes of the failure. The literature review indicates that failure of IT projects can be attributed to six generic root causes, the main categories of the taxonomy. This study investigates the root causes of failure from two major areas: common factors of failure and specific causes existing, which generalize the taxonomy. The study concludes that any reason of IT project failure can be related to one of the six categories in the taxonomy independent of the application domain. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]