IT Project Success: A Conceptual Framework for IT Project Auditing Assurance

The adoption of project management as a discipline in both public and private sector organisations is still growing. The growth has been evidenced by organisations continually aligning project activities with business strategy to achieve their strategic goals and create value for their organisations. Some of these initiatives are managed as IT projects. In 2016 the global information technology (IT) spend is forecast to total US$3.54 trillion. Despite this growth in IT investment, IT projects still fail at an alarming rate. These failed IT projects have resulted in organisations not achieving their strategic objectives and goals, in addition to costing them huge amounts of money. Many factors contribute to IT projects failing, such as a poorly defined project scope, insufficient human resources, cost overruns, poor communication among project stakeholders, project auditing practices not being followed, inadequate practices in project risk management and lack of correct auditing of processes in IT projects. The majority of project audits are based on ad hoc management requests rather than systematic auditing processes throughout the project life cycle. Project managers are still challenged on managing IT projects to successful delivery. The problem addressed in this article is the lack of IT project auditing processes throughout the project life cycle to ensure IT project success. A conceptual framework is proposed for IT project auditing assurance throughout the project life cycle. The framework introduces high-level and detailed IT project assurance processes in each assurance review gate. These processes can be tailored to ensure the successful delivery of an IT project. The benefits of this article are its contribution to the body of knowledge with regard to project auditing. Secondly, practitioners and project managers can use this framework to audit IT projects to ensure successful completion of IT projects.