IS Project Success Research Articles

Elucidation of IS project success factors: an interpretive structural modelling approach

This study extends the debate surrounding the components of IS project success by reviewing success factors from the perspective of their interdependency and influence on each other. This research utilises interpretive structural modelling as the methodology and framework to develop the relationships between the selected factors. This approach is presented as a mechanism that can provide greater insight to the underlying causal interrelationships associated with IS project success and the successful transition to operations. The findings identify a number of key outcomes that have significant driving influence on other interconnected factors in the final model. This study highlights the benefits of an interpretive approach where IS factor interrelationships can be modelled to demonstrate potential influence on other connected factors thereby, increasing the chances of project success.

Measurement of the information system project success of the higher education institutions in Indonesia: a pilot study

This paper presents a pilot study to validate quantitatively an information system IS project success model. In terms of its continual research, the model was evaluated qualitatively using focus group study FGS conducted earlier in the research. This study was also aimed to explain an IS project success performance and its factors that affect the project implementation in the sampled institution. Despite that the findings and its recommendations can only be considered in the context of the pilot study, this research had highlighted the complementary, completeness, and comprehensiveness of the model validation through mixed-methods approach. Such findings had become the main contribution of this study, among others, that is to fill the gap in the literature of the lack of comprehensive detail of model validation through mixed-methods.

Impact of Team Attitude and Behavior on IS Project Success

INTRODUCTION Information technology (IT) is an ever-increasing resource with which an organization can create and sustain its competitive advantages (Powell & Micallef, 1997; Igbaria et al., 1998; Shuit, 2004). Organizations attempt to use IS projects as enablers to perform business activities for providing better products or services. However, an IS project is a two-edged sword. A triumph example is evidenced by General Motors shortening the design-to-production time by 30 months since 1996 via an IS project for digitalization of the engineering process (Nash, 2003). A well documented breakdown failure of an IS project is the computerized baggage handling system at the Denver International Airport, which delayed the opening of the airport by 16 months and went over budget by about $2 billion (Montealegre & Keil, 2000). A number of studies have been conducted to improve IS project performance from the project team's perspective (Henderson & Lee, 1992; Robey et al., 1993; Aladwani, 2002). Such studies demonstrated that managing an IS project team systematically and scientifically can contribute to successful completion of the project. According to the CHAOS reports (The Standish Group, 1994; 2004), the IS project success rate increased from 16% in 1994 to 34% in 2004. Although such existing theories as project management, systems development life cycle management, and project risk management might have contributed to significant improvements in the overall IS project success rate, about two-thirds of all IS projects still belong to failed or challenged categories in 2004 and it seems too difficult to increase the overall IS project success rate further. Consequently, researchers need to carry out more empirical studies about how to achieve IS project success. Given the importance of IS projects and the unsatisfactory IS project success rate, this study attempts to examine factors of achieving IS project success from the team attitude and behavior perspective by incorporating teamwork quality a well-known construct but not being related to IS project success directly and empirically. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the literature review as a theoretical foundation and presents the research model. The research methodology is discussed in Section 3. Section 4 then presents data analysis and discusses results. The last section concludes the contributions of this study as well as addresses limitations and future research directions. THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENT AND RESEARCH MODEL An IS project is unambiguously regarded as an enabler of change for today's organizations. In general, an IS project is intended to develop information systems used to deploy business processes and services successfully. Among IS project success studies, Henderson and Lee (1992) argued that managerial and team member controls can affect IS project performance. A conflict model proposed by Robey et al. (1993) stated that project team members' participation, influence, conflict, and conflict resolution have direct or indirect effects on IS project success. Prior work has also demonstrated that the impact of interpersonal conflict and conflict management (Barki & Hartwick, 2001) and both internal and external team conflicts (Wang et al., 2005) on IS project performance. Aladwani (2002) studied IS project performance by integrating theories of IS, organizational teams, and project management and found that support technologies, management advocacy, and clear goals have direct effects on IS project performance but project-team size and staff expertise have indirect effects on it via problem solving competency. Other researchers, such as Barki and Hartwick (1994), Marble (2003), and Wang et al. (2006), have shed some lights on the impact of management commitment and control on IS project performance. Chan et al. (2008) found that project team task skills can facilitate application and development skills, resulting in IS project success. …

Top management support in multiple-project environments: an in-practice view

Top management support has generally been considered the most critical factor for the success of IS projects. Typically, there have developed implicit or explicit assumptions that top management support has to be constant and consistent during the entire life of an IS implementation project. However, previous research investigating this issue has been based mainly on a ‘single project’ perspective, although contemporary organisational settings have increasingly involved many projects taking place simultaneously. Such multiple-project environments bring into question the feasibility of the previous assumptions and invite revisiting them. This paper aims to do this by examining the materialisation of top management support in a multiple-project environment. To this end, it investigates the interactions between a project to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning system and other projects and programmes in a prominent international organisation. It applies a framework from Actor Network Theory to explore the different aspects of what is involved in being in a multiple-project environment and the nature of the materialisation of top management support. The findings unravel some of the complexity surrounding top management support in this contemporary organisational setting. Some important implications for theory and practice are highlighted and discussed.

Getting the Right Balance in IS Project Management: Seven Guidelines for an Equal Emphasis on the Sociocultural Aspects

This paper argues for a greater emphasis on the sociocultural aspects in the teaching, research and practice of IS project management. It does not advocate disregarding the technical aspects, but suggests that an equal regard for these other key elements for the successful development of information systems is appropriate, indeed essential. Guidelines are provided for ensuring these are considered in any IS project development. These guidelines are formed from an analysis of some key case studies in IS project success and failure and include stakeholder analysis, top manager as champion, participation, long term strategic planning, training and education, taking account of cultural differences, and equal consideration of qualitative measures.

Agility of Project Manager in Global is Project

The agility of the global IS project manager is considered to be important for the success of global IS projects. Yet, there has not been much research on the agility of the global IS project manager from a knowledge perspective. The objective of this research is to investigate the knowledge sets that influence the agility of a global IS project manager, and the mediation effect of the agility on project success. A sample of global IS project managers were surveyed to assess the knowledge that affect the agility of the project manager. System knowledge, project management knowledge, cultural knowledge and interpersonal knowledge had an impact on a project manager's agility. We have also found the mediation effect of the agility on global IS project success. The results have important practical implications as to what areas of knowledge organizations should focus to train their potential project managers for the project success.

Offshore Information Systems Project Success: The Role of Social Embeddedness and Cultural Characteristics

Agency theory has served as a key basis for identifying drivers of offshore information system project success. Consequently, the role of relational factors in driving project success has been overlooked in this literature. In this paper, we address this gap by integrating the social embeddedness perspective and the culture literature to theorize how and why relational factors affect the success of offshore IS projects that are strategic in nature. We identify organizational and interpersonal cultural differences as critical success factors in this context. Using data from a longitudinal field study of 155 offshore IS projects managed by 22 project leaders, we found evidence of a relationship between hypothesized relational factors and two measures of offshore IS project success--namely, project cost overruns and client satisfaction-- over and above the effects of project characteristics and agency factors. Specifically, we found that information exchange, joint problem solving, and trust reduce project cost overruns and improve client satisfaction. We also found a relationship between cultural differences at the organizational and team level, and offshore IS project success. The model explained 40 percent and 41 percent of the variance in project cost overruns and client satisfaction, respectively, for projects with a client representative. For projects with no client representative, the model explained 35 percent and 37 percent of the variance in project cost overruns and client satisfaction, respectively. Collectively, the results have important theoretical and practical implications for how client-- vendor relationships should be managed when partnering with offshore firms and designing offshore IS project teams.

An alternative model for measuring the success of IS projects: the GPIS model

PurposeAims to present an alternative holistic measurement model, the general practitioner IS (GPIS) measurement model, which assists managers in determining the organisation's state of readiness prior to IS investment.Design/methodology/approachThe model is based on assessing four organisational key elements: IT infrastructure, processes, people and work environment.FindingsPresents a classification of the current IS success measurement approaches. The existing approaches were classified into three categories: product‐based, process‐based, and general maturity‐based. The paper highlighted their shortcomings and explained the need for an alternative holistic model to measure IS success in contributing to the business objectives. This has led to the development of a quick reference model “GPIS” to enable organisations to determine their current and required state of readiness for a particular IS project.Originality/valueThe paper presents a novel categorisation of the literature in this field.

The Impacts of Conflicts on Requirements Uncertainty and Project Performance

Conflict is a pervasive phenomenon that permeates information systems development and implementation. The literature has indicated that conflicts, due to their association with negative emotion, will negatively influence IS project development, even after controlling for the effects of conflict management and resolution; however, the negative emotional characteristic of conflict alone has a limited explanatory power of IS project success. The purpose of this study is to provide additional insight, by including requirement uncertainty as the mediator variable, of the impacts of conflicts on project performance. Surveys were sent to Taiwan’s top 1600 companies and the results support the hypotheses. The management implications are discussed.

The Materiality of Information System Planning Maturity to Project Performance

Research for this paper suggests that there is still an alarming lack of success of IS projects in industry today. Two critical success factors that have been examined to date are project manager performance and IS planning maturity. However, the previous studies have bypassed the relative impact of the two factors in combination. This study proposes and empirically tests a model that examines the relationships between project manager performance and IS planning maturity