How Information System Project Stakeholders Perceive Project Success

The management of Information Systems (IS) projects occupies a prominent place in research given the need for continuously improve projects efficiency and efficacy. In the case of developing countries, this is even more important because projects success rates are typically lower than those of the so-called developed countries. Projects success is vital to development, because the countries not only need to use the scarce resources available in the best possible way, but also must gain trust from populations and investors to continue ensuring financing for future projects. Note that developing countries’ governments many times depend on foreign investment to undertake large projects, for instance in the construction or IS infrastructure sectors. However, there are few known studies about the success of IS projects in developing countries. To help fill this gap, we carried out a questionnaire-based survey in four countries. The focus of our survey was on IS projects from the public sector. This enabled to identify quite low levels of success, as well as an urgent need for training and education programmes on project management.

PurposeOrganisations are increasingly using project or programme management offices (PMOs) to co‐ordinate activities across information system (IS) projects. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the presence of PMOs and their involvement in IS projects relates to project success and to senior management satisfaction with those projects.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses an exploratory survey method to consider the relationship of both the presence of a PMO and the involvement of the PMO in five key practices that span the project life‐cycle on project success and management satisfaction.FindingsCounter‐intuitively, it is found that the presence of a PMO reduces senior management satisfaction with IS projects and has no effect on the overall success rates of those projects. The study draws on ideas of escalation of commitment to explain this finding.Practical implicationsThe findings suggest that it is more important for PMOs to be involved at the start and at the review stage of projects, rather than in the on‐going monitoring, which is where much of their current focus is.Originality/valueThis study is the first, that the authors are aware of, to identify a reduced level of management satisfaction associated with the presence of a PMO. It is also the first study to consider PMO involvement at the level of key project practices and hence to be able to suggest how to understand and address the reduced management satisfaction identified.

Research Context: User satisfaction is recognized as a key success criterion in Information Systems (IS) projects. In the IS project context, continuously monitoring this criterion throughout the project lifecycle can reduce training and rework costs, enhance user experience, and prevent client loss. Scientific and/or Practical Problem: Despite its relevance, there is a lack of methods in the IS project management literature to evaluate user satisfaction during the development cycle. Existing approaches focus mainly on end-stage evaluations, limiting timely adjustments and evidence-based decision-making during project execution. Proposed Solution and/or Analysis: This paper proposes a framework for assessing user satisfaction in IS projects through three stages: expectation elicitation, expert inspection, and post-use verification. All stages are supported by questionnaires derived from usability heuristics to guide structured evaluation and comparison. Related IS Theory: The study is grounded in the Information Systems Success Model, which identifies user satisfaction as an essential dimension of project success, and integrates principles from Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). Research Method: An exploratory review of relevant literature was conducted, followed by the design of the proposed framework and its validation through three instrumental case studies across different organizational domains. Summary of Results: The results indicate that the proposed framework enables the evaluation of user satisfaction during system development, allowing early identification of usability issues and improvement opportunities. Contributions and Impact to the IS Area: This work contributes to IS project success management by operationalizing user satisfaction as a continuous and measurable criterion, ensuring its systematic verification throughout the project lifecycle and providing managers with a practical tool for evidence-based decision support.

Benefits of information system projects: The tale of two countries

Shared leadership refers to an emergent, collective team process where leadership is distributed among and stems from team members, rather than a single designated leader. While shared leadership has gained considerable attention in the literature in recent years, it has received little attention in information systems (IS) project teams. In this study, a theoretical moderation framework in IS project teams that portrays the positive relationship between shared leadership and IS project success is presented. Moreover, project-centered moderators (i.e., project complexity and project task interdependence) and team-centered moderators (i.e., team autonomy and team supportive culture) have been proposed to influence the shared leadership-IS project success relationship. This study proposes that this relationship is stronger when projects are more complex and more interdependent, and when teams have a higher level of autonomy and supportive culture.

Opening the black box: Managers’ perceptions of IS project success mechanisms

The Nature of Adherence to Planning as Criterion for Information System Project Success

Influence of managerial control on performance in medical information system projects: The moderating role of organizational environment and team risks

Information Systems (IS) projects often experience inefficiencies due to inadequate risk management, leading to cost overruns, delays, and failures. Traditional risk management approaches struggle to adapt to evolving project risks, which call for a more structured and proactive mitigation mechanism. This study explores the application of Lean methods to risk management in IS projects. A Lean-based risk management approach is proposed, integrating waste minimization, continuous improvement, and value-driven risk mitigation concepts. The paper reviews existing IS project characteristics and risk management frameworks, highlighting gaps in current methodologies. This study also demonstrates how Lean methods can potentially enhance risk responsiveness, optimize resource allocation, and contribute to overall project effectiveness. The review offers practical insights for IS project managers to effectively incorporate Lean into risk management strategies.

Pre-investment evaluation of information system (IS) project proposals persists to be problematic and highly risky in practice. Numerous evaluation approaches and methodologies offered in the literature have not contributed to major improvements in practice. We propose here a radical departure from the dominant conceptions in IS evaluation literature by adopting Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to provide a better understanding of the evaluation of IS proposals in practice and examine the ways in which the evaluation process shapes and ensures the selection of the best IS projects. By drawing on a field study of the IS evaluation processes in a company with a history of IS successes, we reveal the relational nature of IS project proposals and the ways they are constitutively entangled with business processes and practices. We demonstrate how the practice of IS evaluation produces the ‘object’ it evaluates, and how the IS project proposal is produced as a focal actor by relations in the actor-network emerging around it.

This chapter presents a decision support system (DSS) for effectively solving the information systems (IS) project selection problem. The proposed DSS recognizes the multidimensional nature of the IS project selection problem, the availability of multicriteria analysis (MA) methods, and the preferences of the decision‐maker (DM) on the use of specific MA methods in a given situation. A knowledge base consisting of IF‐THEN production rules is developed for assisting the DM with a systematic adoption of the most appropriate method with the efficient use of the powerful reasoning and explanation capabilities of intelligent DSS. The idea of letting the problem to be solved determines the method to be used is incorporated into the proposed DSS. As a result, effective decisions can be made for solving the IS project selection problem. An example is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed DSS for solving the problem of selecting IS projects in real world situations.

Purpose Knowledge sharing is recognized as a critical factor for success in knowledge-intensive environments and project-based work. This study aims to advance understanding of how knowledge sharing relates to project success by proposing and empirically validating a model that explicates its indirect effects through key knowledge management mechanisms. Design/methodology/approach The theoretical model was empirically tested using survey data collected from master’s degree students in the Information Systems (IS) field working in collaborative, project-based teams within an academic project management context. This setting provides a controlled yet knowledge-intensive environment. Findings The results show that knowledge sharing is not directly associated with project success. Instead, its association with project success is fully mediated by expertise integration and absorptive capability, which emerge as key drivers of project success in collaborative IS project teams. In addition, knowledge location and knowledge credibility are positively associated with knowledge sharing, whereas knowledge differentiation is not significantly associated. Originality/value This study develops and validates a theoretically grounded model that integrates and empirically confirms the indirect role of knowledge sharing in project success. By focusing on the underlying mechanisms linking knowledge sharing to project results, the findings contribute to knowledge management and IS project research and offer insights relevant to both educational and organizational project-based contexts, particularly those involving early-career IS professionals.

Information system (IS) project selection is of critical importance to every organization in dynamic competing environment. The aim of this paper is to develop a hybrid multicriteria group decision making approach based on intuitionistic fuzzy theory for IS project selection. The decision makers’ assessment information can be expressed in the form of real numbers, interval-valued numbers, linguistic variables, and intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (IFNs). All these evaluation pieces of information can be transformed to the form of IFNs. Intuitionistic fuzzy weighted averaging (IFWA) operator is utilized to aggregate individual opinions of decision makers into a group opinion. Intuitionistic fuzzy entropy is used to obtain the entropy weights of the criteria. TOPSIS method combined with intuitionistic fuzzy set is proposed to select appropriate IS project in group decision making environment. Finally, a numerical example for information system projects selection is given to illustrate application of hybrid multi-criteria group decision making (MCGDM) method based on intuitionistic fuzzy theory and TOPSIS method.

This article focuses on key determinants of delays in the realization of an information system (IS) project. In particular, the impact of the non-adoption of project management methodology by project managers and the lack of software to manage collaboration on delays in project implementation is assessed. Using a mixed-method approach, the study found that these two determinants have a positive relationship with delays in IS project implementation. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Research problem: Indirect communication is prevalent in business communication practices. For information systems (IS) projects that require professionals from multiple disciplines to work together, the use of indirect communication may hinder successful design, implementation, and maintenance of these systems. Drawing on the Speech Act Theory (SAT), this study investigates how direct and indirect speech acts may influence language comprehension in the setting of communication problems inherent in IS projects. Research questions: (1) Do participating subjects, who are IS professionals, differ in their comprehension of indirect and direct speech acts? (2) Do participants display different attention processes in their comprehension of indirect and direct speech acts? (3) Do participants' attention processes influence their comprehension of indirect and direct speech acts? Literature review: We review two relevant areas of theory-polite speech acts in professional communication and SAT. First, a broad review that focuses on literature related to the use of polite speech acts in the workplace and in information system (IS) projects suggests the importance of investigating speech acts by professionals. In addition, the SAT provides the theoretical framework guiding this study and the development of hypotheses. Methodology: The current study uses a quantitative approach. A between-groups experiment design was employed to test how direct and indirect speech acts influence the language comprehension of participants. Forty-three IS professionals participated in the experiment. In addition, through the use of eye-tracking technology, this study captured the attention process and analyzed the relationship between attention and comprehension. Results and discussion: The results show that the directness of speech acts significantly influences participants' attention process, which, in turn, significantly affects their comprehension. In addition, the findings indicate that indirect speech acts, if employed by IS professionals to communicate with others, may easily be distorted or misunderstood. Professionals and managers of organizations should be aware that effective communication in interdisciplinary projects, such as IS development, is not easy, and that reliance on polite or indirect communication may inhibit the generation of valid information.