Software development is a risky business. You might think, therefore, that the people who do such work -- as well as those who pay for it and depend upon its eventual successful completion -- would be vigilantly concerned with risks; they would pay obsessive attention to each and every one of the factors that might cause failure. But such is not always the case in IT today. A running joke in our industry is that present-day projects fail for many of the same reasons that similar projects failed years ago.