Escalation of Commiement in Software Projects: An Examination of Two Theories

Escalation of commitment is common in many software projects. It stands for the situation where managers decide to continue investing in or supporting a prior decision despite new evidence suggesting the original outcome expectation will be missed. Escalation of commitment is generally considered to be irrational. Past literature has proposed several theories to explain the behaviour. Two commonly used interpretations are self-justification and the framing effect. While both theories have been found effective in causing the escalation of commitment, their relative effect is less studied. The purpose of this study is to further investigate the primary factor that causes the escalation of commitment in software project related decisions. An experiment was designed to examine whether the escalation of commitment exists in different decision contingencies and which theories play a more important role in the escalation. One hundred and sixty two subjects participated in the experiment. The results indicate that both self-justification and problem framing have effects on commitment escalation in software projects but the effect of self-justification is stronger. Significant interaction effect is also found. A commitment is more likely to escalate if the problem is framed positively

“Run Forrest Run!”: Measuring the Impact of App-Enabled Performance and Social Feedback on Running Performance

Exercise tracking apps offer a novel and powerful channel to deliver behavioral interventions at a massive scale. As thousands of fitness tracking solutions emerge, the lack of systematic research quantifying their effectiveness on exercise outcomes becomes more prominent. Drawing on the motivation literature, this paper elucidates the effects of app-enabled motivation on fitness improvement. Specifically, this study examines the two most common forms of feedback available to users of exercise tracking apps, namely performance feedback and social feedback. The results of our field experiment reveal strong evidence that performance feedback and social feedback motivate fitness improvement. Furthermore, whereas the effect of social feedback diminishes over time, the effect of performance feedback remains resilient. There theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed

Project Evaluation: A Mixed-Method Study into Dilemmas in Continuation Decisions

Project evaluations are highly crucial for organizations to manage their information systems and technology project portfolios. This study postulates equivocal situations as the source of dilemmas hindering stakeholders to achieve proper evaluation and purposeful decisions. We examine three factors that are conceived to have high association with equivocal situations when evaluating IS/IT projects, Challenges in project management, Different frames of reference and Lack of evaluation data. The developed model is tested using a survey data of IS/IT professionals through PLS. We find the three factors are significantly affecting the occurrence of equivocal situations with the highest contribution come from the Challenges in project management. Multi-group examinations reveal distinct impacts of the three factors within public versus private sector and high versus low projects in the project evaluation ladder. Post hoc interviews suggest several interesting points especially on how to cope with equivocal situation

OPTIMISM BIAS IN MANAGING IT PROJECT RISKS: A CONSTRUAL LEVEL THEORY PERSPECTIVE

Prior research has shown that people have a tendency to be overly optimistic about future events (i.e., optimism bias) in a variety of settings. In this study, we suggest that optimism bias has significant implications for IT project risk management, as it may cause people to become overly optimistic that they can easily manage project risks. Drawing upon construal level theory (CLT), we investigate optimism bias in managing IT project risks. Based on an experiment with IT professionals, we found that a high-level construal of a project risk leads individuals to have a more optimistic perception about successfully managing the project risk, causes them to focus more on benefits over costs in choosing a risk management plan, and leads them to identify more pros than cons associated with a risk management plan relative to a low-level construal. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed

Why IT-Projects Fail: A Meta-Analysis of the Construct ‘Escalating Commitment’ in Information Systems Research

Escalating commitment refers to situations where decision makers tend to persist with failing courses of action by committing themselves more and more to the course of action as they invest further resources even when they face substantial negative feedback (Brockner, 1992; Newman & Sabherwal, 1996). This article examines the phenomenon of escalating commitment in the domain of information systems by i) systematically conducting a literature review where 23 triggers for escalating commitment in IS were identified. The results of the literature review yield that the main research in this field clearly focuses on studying the phenomenon in the context of it-projects but also on the upcoming research field of online services such as online-auctions. On the other hand ii) we conducted a meta-analysis with the aim of quantifying the power of the phenomenon under discussion based on the literature identified in the first part of our study. The computed overall effect size turned out to be significantly different from zero, but had to be put under reservation after testing the population for homogeneity

Using Perspective Taking to De-Escalate Commitment to Software Product Launch Decisions

In software product development settings when things go awry and the original plan loses credibility, managers often choose to honor the originally announced product launch schedule anyway, in effect launching a product that may be seriously compromised in terms of both functionality and reliability. In this study, we draw on the perspective of escalation of commitment to investigate adherence to original product launch schedules despite negative feedback. Specifically, we use the notion of perspective taking to propose a de-escalation tactic. Through a laboratory experiment, we found strong support that taking the perspective of individuals that can be negatively influenced by a product launch can indeed effectively promote de-escalation of commitment. Furthermore, we found that the experiences of anticipated guilt mediate the relationship between perspective taking and de-escalation, and this indirect effect is significantly greater when a decision maker’s personal cost associated with de-escalation is high rather than low

The Role of Evaluability Bias and the Fairness Effect in the Escalation of Commitment to Troubled Software Product Development Projects

New software product development entails considerable risks. One significant risk is that decision makers can become overly committed to troubled software product development projects (i.e., escalation of commitment). While prior research has identified factors that promote escalation in information technology projects, there has been little attempt to leverage the context of software product development, which can include evaluating attributes of a software product under development and weighing a personal financial reward tied to a successful product launch. In this study, we conducted two experiments to investigate how evaluability bias concerning software attributes and the fairness effect that arises from the relative amount of a personal financial reward influence the escalation of commitment to troubled software product development projects. Our findings suggest that the escalation of commitment to troubled software product development projects is influenced by both evaluability bias, which affects the perceived attractiveness of a software product under development, and the fairness effect, which influences the perceived attractiveness of a personal financial reward tied to a successful product launch. This study contributes to both the information systems literature and the escalation literature by providing novel theoretical explanations as to why escalation occurs in the context of new software product developmen

Making and Evaluating Participant Choice in Experimental Research on Information Technology: A Framework and Assessment

Evaluations of participant samples for experiments in information systems research often appear to be informal and intuitive. Appropriate participant choice becomes a more salient issue as the population of information technology professionals and users grows increasingly diverse, and the distribution of relevant characteristics in participant samples such as age, gender, nationality, and experience can often be unrepresentative of the characteristics’ distribution in target populations. In this paper, we present a framework based on widely accepted standards for evaluating participant choice and providing rationale that the choice is appropriate. Using a step-by-step approach, we compare current practice in experimental studies from top information systems journals to this framework. Based on this comparison, we recommend how to improve the treatment of participant choice when evaluating the validity of study inferences and how to discuss the tradeoffs involved in choosing participant samples

Large Software Implementation Project: A study of software development and project management literature

This study focuses on large scale software delivery, where development is done on top of an existing system or parallel to it. This thesis aims to answer to the question: How to implement a large scale custom solution? Large scale projects take longer than smaller projects to implement and usually they are done in more than in one release. The application’s life-cycle is also planned to last up to decades. Large projects also need special project management skills, executive support, internal investments, strategical vision as well as alignment between IT and business. Large projects are usually complex and have several dependencies. This study also explains what issues projects usually have and what are the constrains of legacy systems and data migration. Different eras of IT systems are also presented as well as reasons why companies should invest to IT solutions. Waterfall model and Agile methodology fundamentals and background are presented shortly. From Agile methodology Scrum and SAFe frameworks are presented as examples. Keywords: Legacy system, Data Migration, Software implementation, project management, COTS, Agile development, Waterfal