Tech Talent Crisis? The Impact of IT Human Capital and Decision-Making Authority on IT Project Performance

Abstract

The continuing problem of the poor performance of IT projects could be exacerbated by the tech talent crisis that organizations are facing. Most of the prior research on IT project management at the organizational level has focused on maturity in organization-wide processes, such as the Capability Maturity Model Integration. To the best of our knowledge, however, prior literature has largely overlooked the role of IT employees’ human capital or decision-making authority in project management. This research aims to investigate how human capital and decision-making authority affect the time and cost performance of IT projects. Drawing upon diverse literature on human and social capital, we hypothesize the effect of IT employees’ education attainment, context-specific work experience, external work experience, and decision-making authority on IT project performance. We test our hypotheses with the U.S. federal government data obtained from multiple sources. We find that context-specific work experience measured by tenure is associated with lower time and cost overruns. Further, external work experience outside the federal government improves project time performance. We also find that the decision-making authority level of IT professionals in the federal government enhances IT project performance. Finally, the educational attainment levels of IT employees are found to be significantly associated with improved project performance. We discuss the implications of the findings for theory and practice.