The impact on project success of using technology in modern project planning and control

Abstract

This paper examines the impact the use of technological tools for project planning and control have on project success. The paper is based on data and conclusions from two earlier international studies involving a wide range of project types and respondents with different stakeholder perspectives. The first study concluded that evaluating project success tended to use rather narrowly focused measures such as achievement of intended outcomes in terms of specification, time and budget. Whilst this was widely accepted as appropriate in early writings on project management, the project concept has shifted and a broader set of outcome measures had become necessary, among those the concern about lifetime value of the project endeavor, the notion of the sustainable enterprise, the growth in interest in knowledge building and learning as a source of competitive advantage, and long term risk apportionment. The second study was based on the observation that measures used to review and reward project management behaviour had an impact on that behaviour. One should therefore be careful when selecting what means and methods to use when executing projects. One activity which in this respect is commonly regarded as an important predictor for project success is the use of advanced technical tools in the planning and controlling of project work. The research questions in this paper is first if the use of technical tools today has the desired effect on successfully completing projects within the traditional parameters of time, budget and quality, and then if perhaps other today recognized as important project success criteria are benefiting, or not, from the use of technological tools. By running a statistical analysis on the database from the first study above of close to 300 Norwegian projects, the conclusion is that the use of appropriate technological tools in project planning, follow up and control clearly is beneficial for project success. However, using the results from the second study, it was disclosed that the impact varies, in the sense that for some criteria the impact is strong, while for other criteria, some of them traditionally regarded as the most important for judging projects success, the impact was insignificant and questionable. One should therefore clarify which success criteria most important to pursue in a project before deciding the level of technical support implemented.