Project Management Success I-C-E Model – A Work in Progress

Journal of Systems and Software, 2006

Traditionally, a project should deliver agreed upon functionality on time and within budget. This study examines the mindset of software development project managers in regard to how they 'define' a successful project in order to arrive at a richer perspective of 'success' from the perspective of project managers. Senior management and members of the development team can gain a better understanding of the perspective of project managers regarding some of the aspects of their work and the project as a whole. Such understanding can facilitate better communication and cooperation among these groups. We investigated components of the developed system (project) in terms of some of the aspects of the delivered system (outcome/project) in order to place traditional measures of success in context with other organizational/managerial measures that have been suggested in the literature. We also investigated specific work-related items. These items have potential implications for the intrinsic motivation of the project manager. The consensus among the project managers who participated in our study indicated that delivering a system that meets customer/user requirements and works as intended through work that provides a sense quality and personal achievement are important aspects that lead to a project being considered a success.

2013

This dissertation discusses how different practitioners define project success and success factors for software projects and products. The motivation for this work is to identify the way software practitioners’ value and define project success. This can have implications for both practitioner motivation and software development productivity. Accordingly, in this work, we are interested in the various perceptions of the term “success” for different software practitioners and researchers. To get this information we performed a systematic mapping of the recent year’s software development literature trying to identify stakeholders’ perceptions about the success of a project and also possible differences among the views of the various stakeholders of a project. Some common terms related to project success (success project; software project success factors) were considered in formulating the search strings. The results were limited to twenty-two selected peer-reviewed conferences, papers/...

This paper analyses the related concepts of software project success, software project management success and software project product success and proposes a set of dimensions for defining and measuring software project success. An extension of the DeLone and Mclean (1992, p. 87) model is proposed as a base model for software project success. Even though this investigation is only a first step in defining project success, it is expected to be of interest to both Information System and Project Management researchers and practitioners.

Evaluating, monitoring, and improving the effectiveness of project management can contribute to successful acquisition of software systems. In this dissertation, we introduce a quantitative metric for gauging the effectiveness of managing a software-development project. The metric may be used to evaluate and monitor project management effectiveness in software projects by project managers, technical managers, executive managers, project team leaders and various experts in the project organization. It also has the potential to be used to quantify the effectiveness improvement efforts on project management areas. The metric is validated by conducting survey studies on software projects from public and private sectors. A statistical analysis of sixteen surveys on software projects, spanning small to large development projects, indicated that there is a strong positive correlation with software project success ratings provided by study participants and project management effectiveness measurements. Other contributions of this research include identification of approaches for measuring project management effectiveness of software projects, establishment of theories on project management and on project management effectiveness measurement, and the introduction and validation of a framework for software project management.

2011

Although there have been studies completed on the critical success factors of software projects, these studies all have been specific to one particular country. There has been no comprehensive study reporting on different project sizes in various domains and in multiple countries. We present our extensive literature survey of critical success factors that impact software projects. Forty-three articles from the years 1990 to 2010 were found to be significant contributions that could be analysed in order to develop a list of critical factors that specifically affect the success of software projects. The method of content analysis and frequency analysis was adopted. Twenty-six critical success factors were found to be related to software project success. We suggest that organisation or project manager is attentive to control the top five critical factors to drive towards project success since the percentage of frequency of occurrences for each is more than 50%. Also, it appears that non-technical factors (94%) dominated over technical factors (6%). In a result unique to our study compared with previous one, we found that the factors of clear and frozen requirements, realistic estimation of the schedule and budget, along with a competent project manager are the five most critical success factors of software projects.

cerc.wvu.edu

Identifying project success rate and project success factors has been an interest for researchers quite a long time. Traditionally, project success is measured based on performance in three criteria: Cost, schedule, and delivered functionality. Various studies included other factors. In addition, there are studies analyzing project success from the perspectives of different stakeholders. Currently, there are no universally accepted criteria and definition for project success. Without a well-established definition, the researchers have the risk of mislabeling a project as success or failure or vice versa. Therefore, in this paper, rather than trying to provide a universal definition for project success, we provide another way of thinking such as defining success from each stakeholder's perspective. First, we review and discuss the criteria used in the evaluation of project success and the perspectives of various project stakeholders. Finally, we explain a simple tool called project success analysis matrix (PSAM) that can be used to determine whether a project may be considered success or not from a specific stakeholder's perspective.

Innovation and Supply Chain Management, 2012

Project success is a vague concept among researchers and practitioners. Many researchers have tried to explain when a project could be called successful, but there is no agreement. The reason is existence of different stakeholders and viewpoints in a project. In this article we aim to make a comparative framework to compare different viewpoints and discover intersections and variances in the concept of project success to decrease these diversities. We review 173 selected papers and make an integrated framework containing nine different viewpoints that could be used as a raw dataset to explore trends in the literature and hidden aspects of project success. Analyzing statistics of this framework we found that: 1) Although the focus on stakeholders' satisfaction are increasing but still cost, time and quality is dominating success criteria for evaluating project success. And also we categorized nine success criteria to three levels of priority i.e. high, medium and low priority, based on the frequency of appearance in the papers. Then we found some corelationships between nine groups of criteria using Association Rules method. 2) During 80s most papers deal with cost, time and quality (project management success), and in 90s it expanded to customer satisfaction (product success), then currently, it expanded to multiple project evaluation (program success). We also found that there are still some forgotten parts of project success and we argue that one of the most important hidden aspects is "Project Selection Success". It should be considered because it defines project success at its origin. Furthermore its influence on the project management and total project success is not clearly defined in the literature.

Evaluating, monitoring, and improving the effectiveness of project management can contribute to successful acquisition of software systems. According to our empirical studies on a range of software development projects, half of the variation in software project success ratings may be explained by project management effectiveness measurements. To improve the quality of the management, to focus our improvement efforts on the right issues, and to increase the odds of success in software projects, it is essential to measure the effectiveness of software project management. In this paper, we introduce four different approaches for measuring software project management effectiveness. Two of these approaches discussed in this paper were successfully used in the development of a metric for software project management effectiveness. The contribution of this paper is the introduction of these approaches for guiding the researchers for the development of other project management metrics.

… Computers. The Internet and Management, 2002

The success of a software development project is generally defined in terms of budget, schedule and customer requirements. However, it is not clear that all project stakeholders hold the same views of success. In this research, we investigate, by means of a questionnaire, those factors that influence software practitioners' view of project success. Our survey shows that the practitioner view comprises two categories, namely personal factors associated with the work and customer/user factors. The personal factor category includes a sense of achievement while working on a project, a good job was done (i.e. a quality was delivered), the project working was satisfying and resulted in professional growth. The customer/user category includes the customer/users were involved, they had realistic expectations and the project met all their requirements.