English abstract
Recent statistics have shown a high percentage of IS projects that failed to fulfill the
expectations of the key stakeholders by overrunning their budget, delays in the schedule,
or meeting their required specifications. This indicates the importance of understanding
the difficulties that impact a project's success and cause a waste of time, money, and
effort in the organization. Due to this, project management and project success/failure are
interesting research areas for consideration. However, the existing studies also presented
the need to conduct field research in a real-life context case study to evaluate the failure
factors. Furthermore, only a limited number of studies discussed the failure of IS projects
from more than one point of view. The main purpose of this study is to present a deep
understanding of the critical failure factors of IS projects using the stakeholder theory,
especially with regard to the public sector which has a different environment from the
industrial or private sector. The critical failure factors were identified by using a
systematic literature review of recent studies. These factors were analyzed, ranked, and
classified into three main categories: Organizational factors, People, and Technology. In
addition, the collected factors were used in a real case study to conduct semi-structured
interviews and have a deeper understating of these factors from the perspective of key
stakeholders. This study highlights the importance of different key stakeholders who are
involved in the project and identifies the most critical failure factors based on each group
of stakeholders' perspective (project managers, business users, and development team).
Moreover, the study highlighted several critical failure factors that were reported
continuously in the previous literature such as communication issues and change
management. Besides that, this study identified three factors not mentioned before in the
literature such as Guideline Availability and Requirement Analyses and shed light on
their impact on projects and how they lead to stakeholders' dissatisfaction. This study
provides a clear picture of the relationship between the critical failure factors and the
different types of stakeholders. Thus, it contributes to the research field by identifying the
CFFs. Practically, it will help the organization know how to deal with critical failure
challenges, which might lead to an increased project success rate.
