Data was collected through 30 comprehensive assessments conducted in Canadian organizations involved in developing products or providing services drawing on IT and software engineering. The size of the assessed organizations ranged from 10 professionals to 250, with an average of 76, and a standard deviation of 64. Table 2 summarizes assessment results. The results indicate that with a likelihood of problems at 34.3 percent, Canadian organizations can expect to face slightly more difficulties than the average organization, which is characterized by a 33 percent value. Out of the 30 assessed organizations, eight exceeded the aforementioned 40 percent threshold, and in all cases, major difficulties were observed during the 12 to 18 months that followed.
Government organizations have a higher risk mitigation capacity than private industry.
But the latter has a higher capacity of anticipating problems and taking appropriate action. A trial was conducted in 1999 with a large government IT project to determine the reliability of the approach. The project called on new technologies and a large pool of resources that did not necessarily share the same processes. It also had particularly challenging coordination aspects stemming from the wide geographical distribution of stakeholders. A second objective was to assess the degree of correlation between the measured likelihood of problems when 259 process-embedded risk mitigation mechanisms were investigated versus 404.