The Influence Of Commitment To Project Objectives In Information Technology (IT) Projects

Managing successful Information Technology (IT) projects remains a challenging and perplexing ambition in today’s complex IT environment where project deliverables continue to be brought in behind schedule, over budget, and with less functionality than originally planned.  This study delves into goal commitment theory to investigate the potential role of commitment to project objectives in improving the performance of IT projects.  The following two questions are considered in this research:  (1) How does commitment influence perceptions of project performance, and (2) What key factors predict commitment?  Survey responses were collected from professionals currently involved in IT projects and data was analyzed using structural equation modeling.  Results indicate that commitment to project objectives has a positive influence on perceptions of project performance both directly and indirectly through individuals’ propensity to report project status information.  Time pressure in the project was found to have a negative influence on commitment to project objectives, while perceptions of personal investment had a positive effect on commitment to project objectives.  Time pressure also had a positive influence on perceptions of personal investment and a negative influence on perceptions of project performance.  Implications for research and practice are discussed

Unpleasant Updates: Discussing Negative Project Performance with Executives

Project managers often have early indications that a project is performing poorly and potentially headed for failure. In such cases, reporting these warnings could prompt executives to provide essential support to mitigate and even prevent problems. However, project managers are frequently reluctant to share such information with executives. This research-in-progress aims to develop a model establishing antecedents that drive accurate status reporting between project managers and executives as well as identifying moderating variables impacting such reporting. The theory of planned behavior and information systems (IS) whistleblowing theory provide the theoretical lenses facilitating the identification of probable antecedents to such reporting intentions. A theoretical model including propositions has been developed

Personality And IT Project Team Makeup

IT project success continues to present major problems for organizations.  The CHAOS survey results for 2004 report that only 29% of IT projects were considered successful, 53% were challenged, and 18% were considered failures.  Many of these problems are avoidable and it is important to understand the various success factors associated with IT projects.  This study provides insight into improving these inadequate IT project outcomes by investigating the influence of IT project team member personality traits on project success factors. The “Big Five” factor model of personality is utilized to measure team member personality characteristics.  Relationships between the Big Five personality traits and the project success factors of “on schedule” and “quality” are evaluated.  Results indicate the personality trait of extroversion is positively associated with keeping the project on schedule, while the trait of openness to experience is negatively associated with keeping the project on schedule.  In addition, conscientiousness was found to have a positive influence on project quality.  Agreeableness was not evaluated and no significant relationship was found between emotional stability and project success

The Influence of Participants' Personality on Quantitative and Qualitative Metrics in Usability Testing

We present the results of a usability study with 35 participants investigating the influence of personality on various metrics used in usability engineering. We conduct a task based usability test with a website integrating tasks of various difficulty and measure performance metrics like task completion rate and time on task. We also use standard questionnaire based usability metrics like the System Usability Scale. Furthermore, we gather qualitative data via open-ended questions and count the number of words as well as the mentions of positive and negative aspects. We measure personality using the well-known big five model, also often referred to as OCEAN model (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) and three basic needs (need for influence and power, need for recognition and performance, need for security and tranquility). We analyze the relationship between personality and usability metrics via correlations and regression models. We identify multiple significant results and show that in our study the personality correlated with some of the usability metrics we inspected. Extraversion and the need for influence and power show the most and strongest correlations. Furthermore, we also show that regression models based on personality traits can explain up to 37% of the variance in usability metrics. The results have implications for the improvement of the selection process of usability test participants as well as for the interpretation of test results. We discuss these implications and give an outlook on further research in this area

The Influence of Goal Orientation, Goal Commitment, and Implementation Mindset on Project Success

While IT project management approaches have been applied and studied for several decades, a large number of projects continue to fail. For instance, Gulla (2012) suggests that 25% of technology projects fail outright, while 50% usually require massive rework by the time they are delivered. Academic literature suggests that such failures can be attributed to expectation misalignment, organizational resistance, system misfit, cultural barriers, and erroneous project management approaches (Dwivedi et al, 2015). To better understand factors that impact project success, we propose an examination of goal orientation, implementation mindset, and goal commitment on project performance. While the impact of goal orientation and its impact on organizational commitment has been studied extensively (e.g., Lee et al. 2010), little is known regarding the impact of goal orientation on goal commitment. In addition, literature has established that multiple forms of commitment (affective, continuance, and normative) have a positive effect on intentions to continue and performance (success) (Korzaan & Brooks, 2015; Lee et al., 2010). However, little is known about the antecedents to these facets of commitment in the context of an information system project. This study seeks to address these gaps by investigating the influence of goal orientations on commitment and further considers the potential intervening psychological states that help explain the relationship between goal orientations and commitment. One such psychological state of interest to this study is implementation mindset (Armor & Taylor, 2003). This is an important research domain as even with extensive literature and a well-trained workforce, a substantial number of IT project implementations continue to fail to meet stakeholder expectations. \ \ This project explores the following research questions: RQ1: Does goal orientation impact psychological states such as implementation mindset? RQ2: Do psychological states such as implementation mindset impact project goal commitment? RQ3: Does goal commitment impact outcome variables such as intention to continue and project success? This TREO talk invites discussion for this research-in-progress

Invoking Emotional Experiences to Improve IT Project Management Learning

With all of the detailed procedural and technical content students encounter in their IT project management education one would expect higher project success rates in industry. Yet, research has shown that these efforts have not resulted in significant project performance improvement (Sirisomboonsuk et al., 2018). To enhance project management education and training, traditional learning approaches have been augmented through gamification, scenario-based learning, action learning, among others (Sibona & Pourreza, 2018). To extend this body of knowledge we develop an emotional experience framework based upon Flow Theory (Csíkszentmihályi, 2008) to measure, classify, and pragmatically apply project management learning approaches. Specifically, we attempt to answer the following research questions: RQ1) Can individual project management learning situations elucidate emotional states, including valence, arousal, boredom, anxiety, and flow in various learning contexts? RQ2) How do these states influence project management learner performance? We attempt to answer these questions through an experiment consisting of three learning approaches, including: 1) a traditional learning scenario consisting of video content, 2) a competitive game using reinforcement structures, and 3) a simulation activity using plastic building blocks as an analog to project tasks. Moreover, all three approaches will include identical priming, review, and assessment activities. We expect that our findings will allow educators to more methodologically apply learning activities to improve IT Project Management learning outcomes