The main objective of this paper is to identify the characteristics of effective IT project risk management and to highlight their influence over the IT project performance in Romanian IT companies. We conducted a study to find out the dimensions of the risk management effectiveness and how it is applied in IT projects of Romanian IT companies. We correlated the risk management effectiveness with the performance of the IT projects (subjective and objective). All our hypotheses were confirmed. The dimensions of effective risk management are "efficiency and the effectiveness of the processes within an IT project", "influence of risks on IT projects", and "human factor involved in the IT project". Risk management effectiveness is positively correlated with the performance of these IT projects.