Impacts of online-community-based collaborative learning on project scope appropriateness and stakeholder management

Abstract

ABSTRACT Most corporate projects suffer from the problem of scope creep, despite of the methodologies available to cope with this issue. Organisations have utilised computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) approaches to enhance employees’ project management (PM) training. Most prior studies on CSCL and PM focus on the application of CSCL for PM training in the contexts of educational institutions. It is thus uncertain that their findings are applicable to the real-world PM situations. Additionally, those studies did not specifically investigate the effects of key PM-related CSCL features on PM learning. Therefore, this study identifies and empirically investigate the effects of the key CSCL features, namely goal orientation, individual accountability, and structured interaction, on the level of scope completeness and the effectiveness of stakeholder management (SHM) in a context in which an online case-based collaborative learning system was implemented for PM learning purposes. Data collected from 264 PM professionals were analyzed using the method of partial least squares to examine the proposed research model. The results show that all the three key CSCL features have a significant direct/indirect influence on the level of scope completeness and the SHM effectiveness. Implications for theory and practice, research limitations, and future research directions are discussed correspondingly.