IS Project Management Success in Developing Countries

A project is believed to be a success if implemented in accordance with the pre-defined time to completion, scope, and costs. Therefore, the research described herein sought to establish how project stakeholders view the success of information system (IS) projects. To attain this objective, the study addressed two basic issues: (1) the measures used to describe success for IS projects and (2) how project stakeholders evaluate success of IS projects. To explore these issues, a survey was administered to project managers, project team members, and end-users involved in an IS project, yielding 220 valid responses. The study identified ten IS-project success measures (SMs): project scope, project schedule, project costs, quality of project management, system quality, user satisfaction, information quality, service quality, system use, and net benefits. The study’s contribution is a five-step research methodology designed to obtain stakeholder perspectives of IS project success. The SMs identified within the study can be useful for practitioners undertaking empirical activities aimed at the successful management of IS projects. A practical implication of these results is to help project managers understand a project stakeholder’s perspective on IS project success. The study’s primary limitation was that the data were gathered only from government administration units in Poland and not from organizations engaged in business; therefore, further research is needed to confirm the generalizability of the study’s results.

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.

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.

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

Benefits of information system projects: The tale of two countries

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.

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.

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

The application of information systems (IS) for supporting human resources management has become increasingly important for organizations in improving their competitiveness. The selection of the most suitable human resources management IS project, however, is complex and challenging due to the involvement of multiple decision makers, the multi-dimensional nature of the selection process and the presence of vagueness and imprecision inherent in the human decision making process. To adequately deal with this problem, this paper presents a multicriteria group decision making approach for selecting human resources management IS projects under uncertainty. Intuitionistic fuzzy numbers are used for effectively modelling the vagueness and imprecision of the decision making process. A multicriteria group decision making approach is developed for calculating an overall performance index for every human resources management IS project alternative across all criteria. A human resources management IS project selection problem is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.

Digital development for a progressive networked society

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.

Using the analytic hierarchy process and goal programming for information system project selection

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.