Project Management: IS/IT Research Challenges

Introduction One of the challenges faced by students that are involved in the acquisition of an academic degree, as Higher Education or a PhD., are related to the difficulties of development of a Academic Research Project. Such challenges are surrounded by incorrect determination of the research scope and complexity, the erroneous estimatives for the research conclusion (or even the time demand due to problems occurring during the research development) or even finishing with poor quality as something that were not expected by the advisor and other evaluators. These elements culminates in the application of Project Management Theory that is being studied by institutions such as the Project Management Institute--PMI (PMSURVEY.ORG, 2010) over the years and which aims to improve the process of project development in general, including academic projects aimed at scientific research in the university accordingly to MUSTARO & ROSSI, 2013. PMI is responsible for developing guidelines for project management as defined on the Project Management Body of Knowledge--PMBoK (PMI, 2008). From the presented scenario, the general objective of this paper is to establish link between academic research projects with the Project Management Theory. As specific objectives, this paper considers: 1) present the types of academic research projects that can be treated according to the precepts of the project, 2) provide project management theoretical foundations, and 3) present part of the process groups of PMBoK (Project Management Body of Knowledge), a framework widely used in over a hundred countries, linking these process groups to the academic research projects. To develop the proposed objectives and present the research results this paper is organized as follows: initially is described the Project Management Principles, then the processes involved in Initiating and Planning Process Groups are detailed based on PMBoK as well their relation with Academic Research Project. For each process group, their relation with the Knowledge Areas from PMBoK are detailed, and specific templates, as an Academic Research Project Plan Template, are presented. Finally, the conclusions are related and future works are suggested. Project Management Principles It is considered that the man have been using actions that turns to practices of project management since long time ago. It is also considered that some important monuments created throughout the history of modern man were built under the precepts of project management although these were not formalized at the time. Valle et al. (2010) show historical analyses that consider the concept of project management can be older than it looks. According to the authors, the construction of the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China and the Coliseum in Rome represent examples of man's efforts that must have been regimented by principles of project management. In the contemporary era is verified, as Valle et al. (2010), that several works were done under management of big monetary amounts and the work force of thousands of workers, which generated the need to implement project management practices. According to the authors, Taylor (1911) was a pioneer in the science of Project Management and Gantt (1919) was another student of these sciences. Both contributed greatly to the practices of modern project management. Although great events of the past suggested the theories of project management, it was only in the early twentieth century that the theories, methodologies and frameworks aimed at project management were in fact established. A timeline, according to Carvalho & Rabechini Jr. (2011), present great landmarks of project management from the twentieth century. This is able to present the evolution of project management practices and represents milestones in this setting, as shown in Table 1. In general, project management practices bring many benefits. …

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought transformative changes to project management, necessitating a departure from traditional methodologies previously employed in IT project implementations. This paper explores the evolution of project management from conventional IT approaches to the dynamic demands of AI-driven projects. While foundational principles of project management—such as planning, risk management, and stakeholder communication—remain relevant, AI projects introduce unique challenges and require significant adaptations to existing frameworks. The study begins by delineating the characteristics and core principles of traditional IT project management. Traditional methods are characterized by their structured phases, fixed requirements, and a focus on sequential task execution. These principles have been foundational in achieving success in conventional IT projects through detailed planning, rigorous documentation, and predefined quality assurance measures. In contrast, AI projects are distinguished by their reliance on data, iterative development, and high levels of uncertainty. Unique characteristics of AI projects include the need for continuous experimentation, data-driven decision-making, and adaptability to evolving project requirements. The paper identifies key challenges in managing AI projects, such as dealing with data quality issues, ensuring model interpretability, and addressing ethical considerations. To effectively manage AI projects, project managers must adopt new strategies, including Agile and iterative methodologies that support flexibility and continuous feedback. The study emphasizes the importance of cross-functional teams, as AI projects require diverse expertise from data scientists, engineers, and domain specialists. Additionally, handling the inherent uncertainty in AI projects involves fostering a culture of innovation and adaptability. Key differences between traditional IT and AI project management are analyzed, highlighting variations in planning and scoping, risk management, stakeholder communication, and quality assurance. Traditional IT management relies on detailed upfront planning and predictable risk management, whereas AI projects necessitate adaptive planning, dynamic risk assessment, and ongoing model validation. The paper also addresses the transition to AI project management, discussing necessary skill adaptations for project managers, organizational changes to support AI initiatives, and the role of specialized tools and technologies. A hypothetical case study illustrates how traditional IT project management experience can be applied to an AI project, providing insights into practical adaptations and lessons learned. LllLooking forward, the paper explores emerging trends in project management influenced by AI advancements and emphasizes the need for continuous learning and adaptation. The evolving role of project managers in the AI era is examined, underscoring the importance of embracing new methodologies and technologies to stay relevant. While core project management principles remain integral, the shift to AI-driven projects requires substantial modifications to traditional practices. Project managers must evolve their approaches to navigate the complexities of AI projects effectively, ensuring continued success in an increasingly technology-driven landscape.

The article is devoted to the issues of combination of the most important components of the theory of sustainable development and the principles of project management. The current state of the problem has been analyzed, the lack of knowledge on the corresponding issues in national literature and practice has been indicated, the rare use of sustainable development elements in project management has been identified. The prerequisites for the involvement of sustainable development objectives in the components of project management have been examined. Achieving the defined purpose is possible through the implementation of projects that aim to take into account the interests of sustainable development, as well as through the implementation of other projects that include the objectives of sustainable development. Critical inconsistencies in methodological approaches to the accomplishment of the objectives of sustainable development and project management have been identified. Thus, a more profound specification of the project's priorities and objectives, as well as the elaboration of time scheduling and scope of work are needed. The objectives for minimization of the identified inconsistencies as well as for rationale for the principles of corporate social responsibility provision have been defined. The assessment of the current regulatory documents in the field of project management with the focus on the involvement of sustainable development objectives has been conducted. It is pointed out that the corresponding aspects are poorly elaborated in the most well-known regulatory documents, namely, Individual Competence Baselinet (ICB), International Project Management Association (IPMA), Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), Project Management Institute (PMI), A Guidebook of Project and Program Management for Enterprise Innovation (P2M), etc. Methodological approach to the integration of management decisions into the project management, the main components of which must be the integration of the regulations of PM into the main stages of SD, the broadening of time and geography of the project indicators, the identification of the correlations between the life-cycle of the project and product, as well as the expenses on the implementation of these projects and products and significant extension of the requirements of the project manager.

The aim of this research is to examine the level of adoption and application of project management practices in a not-for-profit organization within a case study of performance for all northwest. The growing competition for limited resources amongst organizations, both profit making and not-for-profit, continues to be a major driver for these organizations to adopt project management practices that can improve project performance efficiency and increase project success. Many research activities carried out on application of project management principles have been focused on profit-making organization especially the large companies. However, this research attempts to investigate the level of project management application within a not-for-profit company in the United Kingdom. This research was conducted based on Performance for All Northwest (PFA) as a case study. The company is a small social enterprise in the Northwest of England. A review of literature on project management framework, methodology and best practices across various disciplines was conducted. A qualitative method was adopted in the research and semi structured interview was conducted with the founder and a selected employee. The data obtained were subjected to qualitative evaluation, review of literature and a comparative analysis of the current project management practices within the organization with project management best practices was also conducted. The study utilized purposive sampling; a targeted selection process deemed suitable for its focus on individuals with specific insights into the organization. Purposive, or judgmental sampling, is preferred when researchers aim to engage a particular segment of the population that meets predefined criteria. Despite the limited sample size due to company size constraints, two respondents were identified as fitting the criteria based on their substantial experience within the organization. The result of the analysis shows that project management best practices regarding scope, time, and cost management are still lacking within the not-for-profit industry. It also reveals that inadequate knowledge of the importance of project management to organizational efficiency and project performance exists within the organization. The research further made recommendations for Performance for All Northwest and other not-for-profit organizations. The study confirms that although an increasing number of organizations are beginning to adopt modern project management methodologies, many are still using the conventional style of managing projects. The research has highlighted some important issues relating to project management practices at PFA. The research findings have identified some crucial gaps in the adoption of project management practices and will therefore recommend project planning, training, development, and lessons learned strategies to help improve project outcomes. While other studies on project management practices are centered on profits organizations, this study goes on to indicate specifically that not-for-profit organizations have not fully understood and appreciated how project management principles and methodologies can assist them in project performance and easier attainment of organizational objectives.

Project management plays an important role in the competitive scenario, and achieved in the 1990s the status of methodology (Carvalho & Rabechini, Jr., 2005). Nowadays, there are more than 100,000 practitioners that earned the Project Management Professional (PMP®) certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI). This indicator highlights the increasing interest in project management area, especially in the IT companies, which are one of the top five industries in PMI’s membership numbers (PMI, 2005). The widely spread framework proposed by PMI called Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK), now in the third edition (PMBoK, 1996, 2000, 2004), has been adopted by several kinds of project-driven organization (PMI, 2004). PMBoK clusters the main project management best practices in nine key areas. Nevertheless, a research carried out by Standish Group (2003) showed high failure level in IT project in North America. The research involved about 13.522 projects, of which only 34% can be considered a success. The main causes for IT projects failure were related to user’s commitment, manager support and requirement definition. It is important to emphasize that, regarding the project success measure in historical perspective, the success rate improved if compared to the first similar research carried out in 1999, which was just 16%. Based on this scenario, this chapter presents the main organizational project management models in order to help companies to upgrade project performance.

IT project failure is a prevailing issue in the IT service providing landscape which impacts organisations across the world, causing losses, leading to customer attrition, and preventing them from reaching opportunities. While there are numerous reasons for IT project failures, a significant contributor to IT project failure is linked to pitfalls of pre-sales of such projects. This research investigates the pre-sales pitfalls, proposes strategies for their effective mitigation and corrective actions. Adopting an interpretivist paradigm, the study qualitatively explored pre-sales pitfalls and their impact on project delivery through semi-structured interviews with 12 IT project management professionals, aiming to answer three key questions: What are the common pre-sales pitfalls causing challenges for project managers during the project management phases of IT projects delivery? What strategies can be employed to mitigate pre-sales pitfalls and enhance project success rates? Why assessing pre-sales pitfalls is important at the start of project lifecycle of IT projects? Several common pitfalls were identified through 12 interviews conducted and validated with documents analysis, which hinder project success by causing various factors. The study also outlines strategies to mitigate pre-sales pitfalls effectively highlighting early project manager involvement, leveraging past experiences, and conducting risk assessments. Further, it stresses the importance of assessing pre-sales pitfalls early in the project lifecycle to prevent challenges and improve project success rates, stakeholder satisfaction, and proactive organizational actions.

Universities teach project management to information technology (IT) students. The project management principles that students have previously learned are often put into practice in a project course, intended to give final year students the experience of applying their knowledge to real or simulated projects. This paper reports on research that investigated the use of, and usefulness of, project management in student IT projects. The results show that there was a wide range in the application of project management practices, with students being more likely to produce the initial documentation associated with some of the project management knowledge areas than to make use of it throughout the project to monitor the project’s progress. The results also showed that the number of project management guidelines applied in student projects was not linked with IT project success. However, there was a strong relationship between project management plan quality and obtaining a good software product.

Project management methodologies play a crucial role in determining the success or failure of a project. Selecting an inappropriate methodology can lead to inefficiencies, budget overruns, delays, and even total project failure. This article investigates the correlation between project failure and the incorrect selection of project management methodologies through a structured survey conducted among project managers with direct experience from past projects. The research aims to quantify the impact of methodology selection on various project outcomes, including stakeholder involvement, risk identification, and the effectiveness of mitigation strategies. The survey is carefully designed to capture comprehensive data on past project characteristics, including project size, complexity, industry, team composition, and the frequency of methodology changes. It also examines the reasons behind methodology selection, the rationale for methodology changes, and the effect of these decisions on final project outcomes. By focusing on both successful and failed projects, the study identifies common risk factors and assesses how specific methodologies either contributed to or mitigated those risks. A key aspect of the analysis involves using statistical calculations to evaluate project failure and success rates, resource availability, stakeholder engagement, and the extent to which an incorrect methodology influences project deliverables. By employing formulas such as project success rate, stakeholder involvement, resource availability, initial methodology that was used, wrong methodology, correlation between project failure and wrong methodology, most remediated and not remediated risks, correlation between risk monitoring frequency and project failure, correlation between team composition and project failure and correlation between project complexity and project failure This approach allows for an objective evaluation of the degree to which incorrect methodologies correlate with project failures and highlights patterns of risks that are most frequently remediated or left unresolved. The findings from this research will offer actionable insights for project managers and organizations, enabling them to make more informed decisions when selecting methodologies. By understanding the relationship between methodology choice and project outcomes, organizations can adopt best practices to minimize project risks, improve project success rates, and ensure greater alignment between the chosen methodology and the unique needs of each project. Additionally, the study's statistical framework can be applied in future research to further refine the analysis of project management methodology effectiveness.

ISO 9000 certification and construction project performance: The Malaysian experience

When a $145 million IT project failure pushes Los Angeles to the edge of financial meltdown, the County CEO asks Max McLellan, a harried IT project manager, aka The Integrator, for help. The County Board gives Max 30 days to identify the problem and find a solution. At first Max finds the usual missteps, but something bigger and darker beckons, an explosive source of project failure. He must do something different, rattling ghosts of previous County IT failures, uncloaking crookedness, and exposing truths that shatter careers. With some people rooting for his failure, Max battles to fit all the pieces together with the County team, applying his proven framework to define the problem, plan a solution and execute it successfully. It’s common knowledge that barely 50% of IT projects succeed, per a 2017 Project Management Institute report. Equally well-known, approximately 70% of large-scale change management initiatives fail according to a 2017 McKinsey & Co. report. Given the challenge to overcome these low success rates, The Integrator offers a proven narrative on the organizational change framework for achieving Agile IT project management success based on the author’s 45+ year client experiences and published research. The Integrator defines change management as the single overarching methodology integrating Agile IT and project management. It does this because all projects are about change – significant organizational and personal change. The people involved – their participation in and understanding and support of these changes – ultimately determine IT projects success or failure. In fact, while all IT projects are about change, successful projects change human behavior. The methodologies included in the framework, described in The Integrator, include: • Change management as defined by AIM (Accelerating Implementation Methodology). • Project management as defined by the Project Management Institute (PMI) Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) standard. • IT management as derived from the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEEE) Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) standard. • Agile as defined by the Agile Alliance’s Agile Manifesto. Written by a certified Project Management Professional and accredited change management practitioner, The Integrator chronicles the challenges involved in applying this framework in a real-world setting to achieve successful project implementation.

The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management

Status and scope of project management in the hospitality industry

The importance of project management in education has become increasingly evident in our evolving technology-ridden lives. Educators are required to manage complex projects involving multiple stakeholders, resources, and deadlines. These requirements make project management methods of particular interest to educators looking for practical tools. Using project management principles, educators can effectively teach and improve their students' learning outcomes. Project management gives students valuable skills, allowing them to succeed personally and professionally. This merger can contribute to the long-term success of students and the marriage of project management fundamentals, methods, and practices with academics.

This paper presents results of a qualitative study of the adoption of Project Management (PM) practices in an Information Technology (IT) division of a large manufacturing company. Structured interviews were used to gather data from a cross section of IT divisional leaders in the company to test and confirm a project management system developed from a literature review of project success factors that have contributed to projects' being on time, on budget, and of high quality. Data analysis using organization development (OD) grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1990) identified common themes and cultural values that exist among the eight participants. Results of this study include the development of cultural framework to improve organization project performance (project success model) based on organization system design methods constructed from sociotechnical system theory (Taylor & Felton, 1993) and open system theory (Emery and Purser, 1996). In addition, the study confirmed the proposed open system design for the successful adoption of project management practices comprised of a project manager, project teams, performance measurement systems, and supporting management practices. An important conclusion from this research was that IT organizations that adopt the confirmed project success model must develop a project management culture based on shared cultural values of the organization's members that support adoption of project management. An implication of this study to the fields of organization development and project management is the confirmation of a project management system that IT organizations, OD practitioners, and project managers can employ to support the adoption of project management practices at both the organizational and project levels.

Project management (PM) principles are rapidly changing due to business globalization and information technology (IT) advances which support distributed and virtual project teams. Traditional PM focuses on a single project at a single location and is more concerned with project inputs and outputs than with the project work itself. Traditional PM emphasizes scheduling, planning and tracking. The PM paradigm has begun to shift due to the increasing number of distributed projects involving team members from different sites, organizations and cultures. Current and future PM will be more concerned with project work and processes, and collaboration will become essential for success. Academics and practitioners have begun to discuss PM in terms of collaboration; however, there is little agreement as to a definition or interpretation of collaboration. One of the major changes in PM, over the last 25 years, has been the use of computerized tools and methods. In the future, the most significant change in PM may be the use of collaboration. In this article, we provide an explanation of different levels of collaboration, namely the communicative, collective, coordinated and concerted levels. Then we describe a prototype software package called C-PMS (Collaborative Project Management Software) to support 'concerted-level' collaboration among project team members. We believe that C-PMS, which supports all levels of collaboration, especially the concerted level, can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of project managers and team members.