Investigating Critical Success Factors for Software Projects:An InterpretiveStructural Modeling Approach

Software project management is the art and science of planning and leading software projects. It is asub-discipline of project management in which software projects are planned, implemented,monitored and controlled. These projects takes a considerable time and resources from theorganization. Therefore, it is essential that critical success factors (CSFs) of software projects areidentified. The objective of this paper is to develop the relationships among the identified CSFs insmall and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Iran. According to this objective, two steps areprovided: in the first step the author initially uses a related topic of CSFs in software projectimplementation, which aims at identifying and investigating factors that result in more successfulsoftware project implementation that generate higher levels of value for organizations. By integratinginsights drawn from these studies, the author proposed a set of 9 CSFs which is believed to be moresuitable for SMEs. Then, in the second step, the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) methodologyis used to evolve mutual relationships among these factors.

Keywords:

Critical success factors , Software project , Interpretive structural modeling , Small tomedium-sized enterprises , Iran