System Project Failure: The Heuristics of Risk

System project failures are a well-known part of systems development; however, all the potential risks of planning and executing a project effort are not This article offers heuristic guidelines to help IS managers assess these inherent risk factors before initiating and while executing a project. Case examples illustrate how a particular risk factor can result in a failed systems development effort.     

Making IT global – what facility management brings to the table?

ABSTRACT

Globalization retains an imposing future for the managers of numerous companies, while the global information systems (IS) play a significant role in the connection, collection, access and analysis of information produced in interrelated operations from numerous national markets. The popularity of such systems in textile, manufacturing, finance and supply chain grows, as well as the development of IT support for global services remains a challenge. Through a Participatory Action Research project in a global service provider specialized in Facility Management, we investigated the necessity of introducing a systematic integrative approach by a national company for the Global System Development and approaching the issues emerging in a multinational context. As a result, an expansion model for a globalizing company was synthesized and the issues regarding its application discussed. The cultural differences involved in Facility Management market operation regarding both developing and developed European countries were identified and functionality, non-functional requirements and architecture of a global IS were elaborated. Finally, IS development strategy/development process management is outlined for corporations to achieve and maintain global competitiveness.     

A Two-Dimensional Approach to Systems Development

Abstract

Although many variables can contribute to the failure of a systems development project, the use of the traditional f one-dimensional systems development life cycle approach is often a major factor in the failure of such an effort This article describes an alternative method— the two-dimensional approach to systems development— and discusses why IS managers should consider adopting this new development approach.     

Towards an integrated measurement of IS project performance: The project performance scorecard

Determining the contribution of information system (IS) projects is a difficult endeavour. This research presents a framework for evaluating and measuring IS project performance that seek to address this problem while moving away from the reliance on the traditional assessment method (time, cost, specifications). When IS projects fail or succeed is difficult to determine what conditions enabled the outcome. However, if we are to develop a higher level of IS project management competence we need frameworks that can help in assessing IS project outcomes while critically reflecting and learning from IS project management practices. The Project Performance Scorecard (PPS) recommended here is one framework that can help to advance our understanding IS project management and evaluation approaches. This framework integrates concepts from existing models of IS success, the Balanced Scorecard and project management practices. A case study approach is used to illustrate the use of the PPS, and offers insights into how it can be useful in assessing the performance of IS projects.

An empirical study on the implementation and evaluation of a goal-driven software development risk management model

ContextBuilding a quality software product in the shortest possible time to satisfy the global market demand gives an enterprise a competitive advantage. However, uncertainties and risks exist at every stage of a software development project. These can have an extremely high influence on the success of the final software product. Early risk management practice is effective to manage such risks and contributes effectively towards the project success.ObjectiveDespite risk management approaches, a detailed guideline that explains where to integrate risk management activities into the project is still missing. Little effort has been directed towards the evaluation of the overall impact of a risk management method. We present a Goal-driven Software Development Risk Management Model (GSRM) and its explicit integration into the requirements engineering phase and an empirical investigation result of applying GSRM into a project.MethodWe combine the case study method with action research so that the results from the case study directly contribute to manage the studied project risks and to identify ways to improve the proposed methodology. The data is collected from multiple sources and analysed both in a qualitative and quantitative way.ResultsWhen risk factors are beyond the control of the project manager and project environment, it is difficult to control these risks. The project scope affects all the dimensions of risk. GSRM is a reasonable risk management method that can be employed in an industrial context. The study results have been compared against other study results in order to generalise findings and identify contextual factors.ConclusionA formal early stage risk management practice provides early warning related to the problems that exists in a project, and it contributes to the overall project success. It is not necessary to always consider budget and schedule constraints as top priority. There exist issues such as requirements, change management, and user satisfaction which can influence these constraints.     

Assessing enterprise wiki success from the perspective of end-users: an empirical approach

ABSTRACT

The success of wikis on the Internet has led organisations to introduce wikis within corporate settings for multiple purposes. However, despite the popularity of wikis in the public and subsequently in the corporate environment, an empirical investigation of their benefits for individual performance in organisations is still lacking. This study performs an empirical investigation of 177 corporate wiki end-users to evaluate their perceived performance after wiki use. Enterprise wikis’ perceived end-user performance is evaluated by measuring users’ perceived efficiency, effectiveness and capacity development. The findings suggest that the collaboration quality, information quality and system quality of enterprise wikis help their users in terms of increased efficiency, effectiveness and capacity development.     

In search of evidence for model-driven development claims: An experiment on quality,effort, productivity and satisfaction

ContextModel-Driven Development (MDD) is a paradigm that prescribes building conceptual models that abstractly represent the system and generating code from these models through transformation rules. The literature is rife with claims about the benefits of MDD, but they are hardly supported by evidences.ObjectiveThis experimental investigation aims to verify some of the most cited benefits of MDD.MethodWe run an experiment on a small set of classes using student subjects to compare the quality, effort, productivity and satisfaction of traditional development and MDD. The experiment participants built two web applications from scratch, one where the developers implement the code by hand and another using an industrial MDD tool that automatically generates the code from a conceptual model.ResultsOutcomes show that there are no significant differences between both methods with regard to effort, productivity and satisfaction, although quality in MDD is more robust to small variations in problem complexity. We discuss possible explanations for these results.ConclusionsFor small systems and less programming-experienced subjects, MDD does not always yield better results than a traditional method, even regarding effort and productivity. This contradicts some previous statements about MDD advantages. The benefits of developing a system with MDD appear to depend on certain characteristics of the development context.     

Spheres of It Project Complexity and It Project Manager Archetypes and Roles: A Case Study

ABSTRACT

Effective information technology (IT) project managers (PMs) are recognized as being essential for project success. However, little research has focused on the roles IT PMs must play. Utilizing a qualitative field study, we found 4 IT PM archetypes (checklist, technical lead, organizational process lead, and poly-synchronous) employed in practice. We discuss our findings regarding the assignment of multiple PMs in the presence of complex IT projects and provide organizations with practical inferences to consider.     

Board IT Governance in Context: Considering Governance Style and Environmental Dynamism Contingencies

ABSTRACT

We theorize that IT governance (ITG) by the board of directors is most effective when there is a fit between the dynamics of the business environment and the governance style through which board ITG is delivered. Survey findings from 110 board members largely supported these assertions. Findings show that authoritative governance style and environmental dynamism represent important boundary conditions for the efficacy of board ITG to achieve performance gains. Research and practical implications are discussed.     

A new framework for managing IT-enabled business change

Abstract. Although information systems and technology (IS/IT) investments have always caused varying degrees of business change, the main purpose of many of today's IS/IT implementations is to change the business and/or organization in some significant way. However, most organizations' approaches to managing IS/IT developments have changed little in the last 15–20 years and are heavily dependent on methodologies of IS/IT development and associated project management principles. The philosophy being adopted by many organizations today is that there are few IS/IT projects (some infrastructure investments only) that do not cause business changes and therefore they are really 'business projects involving IS/IT'. This exploratory research set out to devise a new framework for 'IT and change' management, which is more appropriate to today's realities than traditional approaches. The initial framework was derived from 'first principles', then adapted and further developed by applying and testing it in a range of real projects in organizations. This paper summarizes the results of that work.     

Performance on agile teams: Relating iteration objectives and critical decisions to project management success factors

ContextWhile project management success factors have long been established via the golden triangle, little is known about how project iteration objectives and critical decisions relate to these success factors. It seems logical that teams’ iteration objectives would reflect project management success factors, but this may not always be the case. If not, how are teams’ objectives for iterations differing from the golden triangle of project management success factors?ObjectiveThis study identifies iteration objectives and the critical decisions that relate to the golden triangle of project management success factors in agile software development teams working in two-week iterations.MethodThe author conducted semi-structured interviews with members across three different agile software development teams using a hybrid of XP and Scrum agile methodologies. Iteration Planning and Retrospective meetings were also observed. Interview data was transcribed, coded and reviewed by the researcher and two independently trained research assistants. Data analysis involved organizing the data to identify iteration objectives and critical decisions to identify whether they relate to project management success factors.ResultsAgile teams discussed four categories of iteration objectives: Functionality, Schedule, Quality and Team Satisfaction. Two of these objectives map directly to two aspects of the golden triangle: schedule and quality. The agile teams’ critical decisions were also examined to understand the types of decisions the teams would have made differently to ensure success, which resulted in four categories of such decisions: Quality, Dividing Work, Iteration Amendments and Team Satisfaction.ConclusionThis research has contributed to the software development and project management literature by examining iteration objectives on agile teams and how they relate to the golden triangle of project management success factors to see whether these teams incorporate the golden triangle factors in their objectives and whether they include additional objectives in their iterations. What’s more, this research identified four critical decisions related to the golden triangle. These findings provide important insight to the continuing effort to better assess project management success, particularly for agile teams.     

A multi-level, multi-theory perspective of information technology implementation

Abstract.  Much of information technology (IT) implementation research has focused on individuals' acceptance of IT by examining their behaviour when faced with new IT and the antecedents of these behaviours. As they are frequently undertaken within a project framework, IT implementations also entail the application of project management practices in order to be successful. Based on the premise that antecedents of lower level theories are frequently determined by the outcomes of a higher level theory, the present paper illustrates how organizational-level decisions, examined from the perspective of economics theories, can help explain the antecedents of project risk management at the project and individual levels. To do so, the paper describes an IT implementation effort which went through three phases; the first two of which were abandoned versions of the same project. An organizational-level analysis of the case from an economics perspective and its project-level analysis from a risk management perspective show how organizational-level decisions influenced the antecedents at the project and individual levels, providing a more complete understanding of the IT implementation in question, an understanding which neither a theory approach nor a level perspective could provide on its own.     

Integrating IS Disciplines into End-User Training

Abstract

In addition to software training, users need to learn systems analysis concepts and development techniques that will enable them to develop better and more reliable end-user applications. IS managers should realize that this type of IS-sponsored training not only improves the users’ productivity but the IS staffs as well.     

The TRAINS project: a case study in building a conversational planning agent

Abstract

The TRAINS project is an effort to build a conversationally proficient planning assistant. A key part of the project is the construction of the TRAINS system, which provides the research platform for a wide range of issues in natural language understanding, mixed-initiative planning systems, and representing and reasoning about time, actions and events. Four years have now passed since the beginning of the project. Each year a demonstration system has been produced that focused on a dialogue that illustrates particular aspects of the research. The commitment to building complete integrated systems is a significant overhead on the research, but it is considered essential to guarantee that the results constitute real progress in the field. This paper describes the goals of the project, and the experience with the effort so far.     

Source code size estimation approaches for object-oriented systems from UML class diagrams: A comparative study

BackgroundSource code size in terms of SLOC (source lines of code) is the input of many parametric software effort estimation models. However, it is unavailable at the early phase of software development.ObjectiveWe investigate the accuracy of early SLOC estimation approaches for an object-oriented system using the information collected from its UML class diagram available at the early software development phase.MethodWe use different modeling techniques to build the prediction models for investigating the accuracy of six types of metrics to estimate SLOC. The used techniques include linear models, non-linear models, rule/tree-based models, and instance-based models. The investigated metrics are class diagram metrics, predictive object points, object-oriented project size metric, fast&&serious class points, objective class points, and object-oriented function points.ResultsBased on 100 open-source Java systems, we find that the prediction model built using object-oriented project size metric and ordinary least square regression with a logarithmic transformation achieves the highest accuracy (mean MMRE = 0.19 and mean Pred(25) = 0.74).ConclusionWe should use object-oriented project size metric and ordinary least square regression with a logarithmic transformation to build a simple, accurate, and comprehensible SLOC estimation model.     

Problems and their mitigation in system and software architecting

ContextToday, software and embedded systems act as enablers for developing new functionality in traditional industries such as the automotive, process automation, and manufacturing automation domains. This differs from 25–30 years ago when these systems where based on electronics and electro-mechanical solutions. The architecture of the embedded system and of the software is important to ensure the qualities of these applications. However, the effort of designing and evolving the architecture is in practice often neglected during system development, whilst development efforts are centered on implementing new functionality.ObjectiveWe present problems and success factors that are central to the architectural development of software intensive systems in the domain of automotive and automation products as judged by practitioners.MethodThe method consisted of three steps. First, we used semi-structured interviews to collect data in an exploratory manner. As a second step, a survey based on problems extracted from the interview data was used to investigate the occurrence of these problems at a wider range of organizations. In order to identify and suggest how to mitigate the problems that were considered important, we finally performed root cause analysis workshops, and from these a number of success factors were elicited.ResultsA total of 21 problems have been identified based on the interview data, and these are related to the technical, organizational, project, and agreement processes. Based on the survey results, the following four problems were selected for a root cause analysis: (1) there is a lack of process for architecture development, (2) there is a lack of method or model to evaluate the business value when choosing the architecture, (3) there is a lack of clear long-term architectural strategy, and (4) processes and methods are less valued than knowledge and competence of individuals.ConclusionIn conclusion, the following identified success factors are crucial components to be successful in developing software intensive systems: (1) define an architectural strategy, (2) implement a process for architectural work, (3) ensure authority for architects, (4) clarify the business impact of the architecture, and (5) optimize on the project portfolio level instead of optimizing each project.     

Systematic analyses and comparison of development performance and product quality of Incremental Process and Agile Process

ContextAlthough Agile software development models have been widely used as a base for the software project life-cycle since 1990s, the number of studies that follow a sound empirical method and quantitatively reveal the effect of using these models over Traditional models is scarce.ObjectiveThis article explains the empirical method of and the results from systematic analyses and comparison of development performance and product quality of Incremental Process and Agile Process adapted in two projects of a middle-size, telecommunication software development company. The Incremental Process is an adaption of the Waterfall Model whereas the newly introduced Agile Process is a combination of the Unified Software Development Process, Extreme Programming, and Scrum.MethodThe method followed to perform the analyses and comparison is benefited from the combined use of qualitative and quantitative methods. It utilizes; GQM Approach to set measurement objectives, CMMI as the reference model to map the activities of the software development processes, and a pre-defined assessment approach to verify consistency of process executions and evaluate measure characteristics prior to quantitative analysis.ResultsThe results of the comparison showed that the Agile Process had performed better than the Incremental Process in terms of productivity (79%), defect density (57%), defect resolution effort ratio (26%), Test Execution V&V Effectiveness (21%), and effort prediction capability (4%). These results indicate that development performance and product quality achieved by following the Agile Process was superior to those achieved by following the Incremental Process in the projects compared.ConclusionThe acts of measurement, analysis, and comparison enabled comprehensive review of the two development processes, and resulted in understanding their strengths and weaknesses. The comparison results constituted objective evidence for organization-wide deployment of the Agile Process in the company.     

Understanding the attitudes,knowledge sharing behaviors and task performance of core developers: A longitudinal study

ContextPrior research has established that a few individuals generally dominate project communication and source code changes during software development. Moreover, this pattern has been found to exist irrespective of task assignments at project initiation.ObjectiveWhile this phenomenon has been noted, prior research has not sought to understand these dominant individuals. Previous work considering the effect of team structures on team performance has found that core communicators are the gatekeepers of their teams’ knowledge, and the performance of these members was correlated with their teams’ success. Building on this work, we have employed a longitudinal approach to study the way core developers’ attitudes, knowledge sharing behaviors and task performance change over the course of their project, based on the analysis of repository data.MethodWe first used social network analysis (SNA) and standard statistical analysis techniques to identify and select artifacts from ten different software development teams. These procedures were also used to select central practitioners among these teams. We then applied psycholinguistic analysis and directed content analysis (CA) techniques to interpret the content of these practitioners’ messages. Finally, we inspected these core developers’ activities as recorded in system change logs at various points in time during systems’ development.ResultsAmong our findings, we observe that core developers’ attitudes and knowledge sharing behaviors were linked to their involvement in actual software development and the demands of their wider project teams. However, core developers appeared to naturally possess high levels of insightful characteristics, which became evident very early during teamwork.ConclusionsProject performance would likely benefit from strategies aimed at surrounding core developers with other competent communicators. Core developers should also be supported by a wider team who are willing to ask questions and challenge their ideas. Finally, the availability of adequate communication channels would help with maintaining positive team climate, and this is likely to mitigate the negative effects of distance during distributed developments.     

Security and Control in the Cloud

ABSTRACT

Cloud computing is a new IT delivery paradigm that offers computing resources as on-demand services over the Internet. Like all forms of outsourcing, cloud computing raises serious concerns about the security of the data assets that are outsourced to providers of cloud services. To address these security concerns, we show how today's generation of information security management systems (ISMSs), as specified in the ISO/IEC 27001:2005, must be extended to address the transfer of security controls into cloud environments. The resulting virtual ISMS is a standards-compliant management approach for developing a sound control environment while supporting the various modalities of cloud computing.

This article addresses chief security and/or information officers of cloud client and cloud provider organizations. Cloud clients will benefit from our exposition of how to manage risk when corporate assets are outsourced to cloud providers. Providers of cloud services will learn what processes and controls they can offer in order to provide superior security that differentiates their offerings in the market.