Vital Elements/Factors of Success and Failure of IT Projects in Iran

Nowadays using Information Technology to overcome rapid environmental changes and adopting flexibility is necessary and inevitable. Yet, implementation ofIT projects in many cases is subject to failure. This research seeks to identify vital elements/factors of success and failure of IT projects in Iran and defining techniques to decrease the rate of failure. These elements/factors have been assessed under two general classifications: infrastructural including technical, human, economic, cultural, and management! administrative factors, and superficial, including size of the organization and the project, To identifying infrastructural factors, expert survey questionnaires has been applied. Results show that administrative/ management-strategic factors, and cultural - social are more important than financial - economic and technological - human factors. And most important of all is the absence of sufficient commitment on the side of senior managers of the organizations and unfamiliarity of people and authorities with the structure and performance 0 f IT. Superficial factors have been analyzed dynamically in two dimensions: size of the organization and the project. The results of the descriptive analysis shows that the larger the organization and the project, the higher the risk of failure.By the end, the conceptual model of the vital elements of success and failure of IT projects has been presented as well as suggestions for successful execution of such projects and future research in this field.