Estimating and Managing Enterprise Project Risk Using Certainty

The literature reports that 73% of enterprise projects fail due to insufficient risk estimation and management. This study focuses on developing a model to estimate the risk in enterprise software development projects. The traditional practice of measuring the risk in enterprise projects uses risk exposure which is unable to quantify the risk beyond the expected value of the socio-economic cost. To address this, the current study examines how enterprise project managers may quantify the uncertainty underlying risk by calculating certain probability and then using a probability distribution to determine the unknown probability values. Thus, this paper is unique in that it presents a model to measure the risk based on certain probability rather than unknown probability. A case-study of 19 enterprise software projects is used to apply and validate the model.