PROJECT RISK RANKING BASED ON PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS - AN EMPIRICAL STUDY IN MALAYSIA-SINGAPORE CONTEXT

Information Technology (IT) remains a robust and sustainable industry, re-sulting in high demand for IT project practitioners. Nevertheless, the high failure rate of IT projects has resulted in significant losses for many companies. This crucial issue needs immediate attention. One of the focusing points should be adopting a practical and proactive project risk management approach. This study aims to determine whether Prin-cipal Component Analysis (PCA) can be used in project risk management. The survey was conducted on targeted project managers in the Malaysia-Singapore region. Under-lying trends and patterns were analyzed based on an intrinsic risk ranking study. PCA was performed to isolate highly associated key risks from less associated lower-ranked risks. As a result, PCA effectively removed weakly correlated risk factors while identify-ing significant components and retaining the data information. The results showed that combining PCA with established risk management approaches provides a credible risk assessment based on criticality.