Withholding Bad News In Information Technonlogy Projects: The Effect Of Positive Psychology

Managers of IT projects (PMs) tend to gloss over the reality in their external reports including withholding bad news ( mum effect ). Reasons that have been suggested for this bias can be classified as personal-oriented and project-oriented. This paper is an initial study on the impact of positive psychology on IT project management. Prior studies have found that High Psychological Positive Capital (PsyCap) of individuals is positively correlated with their work satisfaction and higher performance. PsyCap comprises individual\u27s positive capacities of optimism, hope, resilience and efficacy. Drawing from Beck\u27s cognitive theory, we hypothesized that High PsyCap PMs, when required to report bad news to a client, are inclined to consider the project-oriented reasons rather than the personal-oriented ones. As a result, they are more willing to report bad news compared to Low PsyCap PMs. A questionnaire consisting of four cases of bad news in IT projects, together with PsyCap tests, was distributed to professional communities on the internet. Data was collected from 42 respondents. The results of the statistical analysis have shown some support for our hypotheses. The research encourages more research on PsyCap contribution to various aspects of project performance and success. Such research may also have practical implications for PM recruiting and training

MINIMIZING ERP RISKS WITH IT CULTURE

This paper adds to the knowledge on the implementation of enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) in small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It suggests that IT culture might mitigate the risk of ERP system implementation. IT culture in the context of this paper is referred to as the existence and the increase of the unified regulation standardization relating to IT, knowledge-sharing regarding the use of organizational systems and the extent of the use of Internet. We conducted in-depth interviews with ERP-SME consultants. Based on the analysis of these interviews we have noticed that in organizations where the existence of IT culture was identified exceeding the planned vs. actual implementation hours was not found. When the existence of an IT culture was not identified exceeding the planned vs. actual implementation hours was found. Based on this work we recognize comparatively unexplored fields of IT culture. It is it important to explore IT culture in the context of the concepts mentioned above to mitigate risk factors that have emerged in ERP implementations