Evaluation of Software Project Failure and Abandonment in Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria

Many organizations have embraced software development project only to abandon it later after considerable time and effort has been put in it. Project abandonment occurs when either problems arise in perceiving, analysing, designing, or configuring the system objectives or the technological basis for the system and its behavioural, political, or organizational issues directly or indirectly affect ways to bring the project to a successful completion within the estimated budget and schedule constraints, or when organizational environmental factors combined to reduce the project’s expected benefits or increase its expected costs. The study is investigative in nature using questionnaire method to collect data directly from the respondents. The research subjects were heads of computer units in government-owned tertiary institution in the South-East and South-South geopolitical areas of Nigeria who are expected to be well-informed about projects carried out in their organizations. The findings of the study, though preliminary in nature indicates software projects failure and abandonment as multifaceted issue defying easy explanations. Paying attention to these factors during software project development can help avoid failure and increase successful completion of the project. Keywords: project management, abandonment, failure, software project, warning signal

The Impact of Organizational Changes on Increasing SMEs Competitiveness

Nowadays changes are compulsory for an organization in order to survive and stay competitive in a market. This paper discusses the aspects of understanding the general framework for an effective and efficient implementation of the organizational changes, as well as, their impact on motivation, employment, responsibility, competitive abilities, and it compares the measurable units of the capacity development for organizational changes. Besides, it focuses on creative dimensions and change management, new organizational knowledge, reward systems, managerial behavior, and organizational culture as a result of the organizational changes. Also, this study argues the value of organizational culture that needs to be shared between organization employees in order to help perform their duties as an important unit of the organizational change success. To obtain the results of this study are processed data of 200 SMEs that operate their activity in the Republic of Kosovo. These data were processed mainly using IBM SPSS software. The findings indicate that the proper organizational change management may help SMEs to be more successful in relation to the competition. And that the biggest challenge that successful managers face is to lead continuously the organizational systems toward the highest stages of organizational development. Moreover, results have shown that changes in the factors such as: organizational dimensions and organizational characteristics are closely related to competitive capability and organizational culture of the SMEs, as well as, changes in organizational culture may increase the competitive capability of SMEs in the competitive market.&nbsp

Customer knowledge management antecedent factors for enterprise software quality

Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) plays an important role in the production of high quality software products. Previous studies have only focused on the technical aspects of software quality. However, because of the nature of enterprise software, there is a greater dependence on CKM for customization, enhancement, maintenance, and training. As CKM in Enterprise Software (ES) development is still immature, this raises questions on how CKM can help ES development companies to improve their software quality. In this research, Knowledge-Based View (KBV) and Theory of Technology were used to demonstrate the Organizational, Human, and Technological antecedent factors that enable the CKM process and lead to ES quality. Human, Organizational and Technological CKM antecedent factors were identified from the literature. The importance degree of each factor was determined by experts from ES development companies using Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). Moreover, based on high priority factors, a theoretical model was developed. The proposed model was evaluated by distributing a survey questionnaire to decision-makers in ES development companies. With 164 valid questionnaires received, the collected data was analyzed using the Partial Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) technique. The results show that Customer Involvement together with Senior Management Support were the most influential factors. There was no impact from Organizational Training, Customer Knowledge Map, and CKM Strategy Development. The results revealed that the impact of CKM on software quality is significant. The model developed in this research can be used as a guideline for the successful application of CKM in enterprise software development companies to improve the software quality

On Regulatory and Organizational Constraints in Visualization Design and Evaluation

Problem-based visualization research provides explicit guidance toward identifying and designing for the needs of users, but absent is more concrete guidance toward factors external to a user's needs that also have implications for visualization design and evaluation. This lack of more explicit guidance can leave visualization researchers and practitioners vulnerable to unforeseen constraints beyond the user's needs that can affect the validity of evaluations, or even lead to the premature termination of a project. Here we explore two types of external constraints in depth, regulatory and organizational constraints, and describe how these constraints impact visualization design and evaluation. By borrowing from techniques in software development, project management, and visualization research we recommend strategies for identifying, mitigating, and evaluating these external constraints through a design study methodology. Finally, we present an application of those recommendations in a healthcare case study. We argue that by explicitly incorporating external constraints into visualization design and evaluation, researchers and practitioners can improve the utility and validity of their visualization solution and improve the likelihood of successful collaborations with industries where external constraints are more present.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, presented at BELIV workshop associated with IEEE VIS 201

Introducing a Framework to Capture and Reuse Tacit Knowledge in Software Project Management

In rapidly growing global companies, comprehensive training programs as well as in depth sharing of knowledge are essential factors to maintain the quality of human capital despite rapid expansion. Different dimensions of Knowledge management address the need and approach to leverage dispersed knowledge in order to make it visible and accessible for everyone to improve organizational performance. However, there has been a scarcity of successful and holistic models that define and categorize tacit knowledge in order to capture and distribute it for the benefit of others. This paper focuses on developing a framework in order to capture experiences regarding software project management and to provide a platform for managers to inherit knowledge from and bequeath their learning to others at large organizations. In order to build up and enhance the framework, the majority of information was gleaned from intensive interviews with top software project managers at Infosys, a well-known global company in the field of software development and consulting services. The final framework we developed can act as a comprehensive data-repository for capturing, storing, searching, and distributing tacit knowledge of project managers

A risk-based MADM model for selecting free-libre open source software tools in the domain of IT service management

The availability of free-libre open source software (FLOSS) has stimulated their organizational implementation in many countries. The main attractiveness for it is the free-cost license of usage regarding with acquisition of COTS (components of the shelf) commercial software, among other factors such as: maturity status, available technical community support, popularity, and compliance to international standards. However, not of the all FLOSS tools released from such FLOSS development projects achieve the expected qualities, and thus organizations interested in using them must conduct a careful evaluation-selection process. With this in mind, several evaluation-selection frameworks for FLOSS have been reported in the literature and some studies have identified a set of organizational factors associated to successful and failed utilizations of FLOSS tools in organizations. In this research, we elaborate a FLOSS Evaluation-Selection model by combining both sets of literature on FLOSS evaluation models and FLOSS implementation models. This model is implemented with a MADM (Multi-Attribute Decision-Making) risk-based mechanism. We illustrate this model with the evaluation-selection of a FLOSS tool in the domain of Information Technology Service Management (ITSM). Hence, this paper contributes to our body of knowledge with the provision of a simplified evaluation-selection model for FLOSS tools derived from two core sets of FLOSS literatures, under an innovative risk-based approach

Agile Succes Factors : a qualitative study about what makes agile projects successful

Various studies show great improvements in software projects when agile software development is applied. However, there are still remaining problems and there are also reports about project failures in the agile community. This raises the question of what factors distinguish successful agile software projects and teams from less successful ones? The authors of the Swiss Agile Study wanted to shed some light on these questions. We conducted a qualitative interview study with eight successful agile IT companies. We asked them about the essential success factors in their agile projects. The findings are divided into three different categories: Engineering practices, management practices and the values, or culture, they live. On the engineering level it was found that these companies apply many technical practices in a very disciplined way, with a strong emphasis on quality assuring practices like unit testing, continuous integration and automation, and clean coding. On the management level it was pointed out that clear requirements, which are verified and validated in very close collaboration with the customer, are essential. The same was true for very close communication within the team. The third aspect that was found, was that in each successful team there was a kind of Agile Champion who motivated and inspired the team to use agility. On the value level we found that successful agile teams live a culture of openness and transparency. They establish an agile culture at least on the team and organizational level (we found only one company who had established the agile method in the whole company). Third, they live an attitude of craftsmanship, being proud of their work and striving for high quality work. Finally we noticed, that while putting high emphasize on the above practices, mature agile teams start adapting these practices and the agile process to their needs, when they notice that some of the practices do not work or that following the recipe is insufficient. A constant probing, sensing and appropriate responding was observed. This is the typical pattern for moving forward in complex adaptive systems. Applying a sense-making methodology like the Cynefin framework, theoretically explains the observations in the present study. Companies should therefore be aware, that software projects are often located in the complex domain, i.e. can be modeled as complex adaptive systems. These kinds of problems rather require emergent practices instead of good or best practices and an understanding of the implications of complexity theory is of merit

Toward a survey instrument for investigating customer knowledge management in software companies

This paper presents a method of developing an instrument for Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) in Enterprise Software (ES) development. Knowledge-Based View (KBV) and Theory of Technology in a Generic CKM framework were used to demonstrate the Organizational, Human, and Technological factors that enable the CKM process. Human, Organizational and Technological CKM enablers were identified from the literature. The weight and priority of these factors were determined by experts from the ES development companies. Based on the high priority factors, we hypothesized the constructs and develop measurement items to be validated. The measurement items are adopted from the previous validated sources. The instrument was evaluated using content validity and a pilot study. A Content Validity Index (CVI) approach was used to validate the instruments in term of relevancy and simplicity. During the content validity, the number of measurement items was reduced from 50 to 46. Moreover, the survey questionnaire of this study can be used as the foundation for the development of policy as well as strategy to enhance the probability of successful implementing the CKM

Costs, Benefits and Value Distribution – Ingredients for Successful Cross-Organizational ES Business Cases

This paper introduces my PhD research project on developing guidelines for creating successful business cases for Enterprise System implementations in network settings. Three important aspects that were found to be important in such business cases are: the costs, benefits and the value distribution within a network. Each of the three aspects is addressed in this paper and the relationships between them are pointed out. A research model is presented showing how all three aspects contribute to the main goal of defining successful business case guidelines

Can anybody help? : mitigating IS development project risk with user

In this paper we aim to gain insight into the relationship between user participation modes and project risk factors, and then we construct a model that can be used to determine how user participation can be successfully applied in ISD projects with a given set of risk factors. We perform an in-depth literature review, which aims to clarify the concept of user participation as part of risk management. We then report on the results of a case study in Cap Gemini where we conduct an exploratory research of the application of user participation in practice. For this exploratory research, a quantitative and qualitative research method was designed in the form of a survey and interviews. Though the results from our case study we gain insight into the relationship between user participation and IS project risk and also determine how user participation can be used to mitigate such risk