A Contingency Approach to Software Project Coordination

Andres, Hayward P.; Zmud, Robert W.

doi:10.1080/07421222.2002.11045695

Cited by 195 publications

(150 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Software projects vary in their information needs and capabilities and thus may benefit from a tailored management approach. Shenhar (2001) notes that the importance of tailoring project practices to project characteristics has often been ignored in the "universalist" or "best practices" view of project management; thus a more project specific approach is advocated (Andres and Zmud 2002, MacCormack et al 2003. Differences in project contexts (i.e., in project task, team, and PM) are reflected in differences in the projects' information processing needs or capabilities leading to information gaps and thus in the likelihood of critical incidents.…”

Section: An Information Processing Perspective Of Software Offshore Omentioning

confidence: 99%

Project Managers' Practical Intelligence and Project Performance in Software Offshore Outsourcing: A Field Study

Langer

Slaughter

Mukhopadhyay

2014

Information Systems Research

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Full terms and conditions of use: http://pubsonline.informs.org/page/terms-and-conditionsThis article may be used only for the purposes of research, teaching, and/or private study. Commercial use or systematic downloading (by robots or other automatic processes) is prohibited without explicit Publisher approval, unless otherwise noted. For more information, contact permissions@informs.org.The Publisher does not warrant or guarantee the article's accuracy, completeness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. Descriptions of, or references to, products or publications, or inclusion of an advertisement in this article, neither constitutes nor implies a guarantee, endorsement, or support of claims made of that product, publication, or service. Copyright © 2014, INFORMS Please scroll down for article-it is on subsequent pagesINFORMS is the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the fields of operations research, management science, and analytics. For more information on INFORMS, its publications, membership, or meetings visit http://www.informs.org T his study examines the role of project managers' (PM) practical intelligence (PI) in the performance of software offshore outsourcing projects. Based on the extant literature, we conceptualize PI for PMs as their capability to resolve project related work problems, given their long-range and short-range goals; PI is targeted at resolving unexpected and difficult situations, which often cannot be resolved using established processes and frameworks. We then draw on the information processing literature to argue that software offshore outsourcing projects are prone to severe information constraints that lead to unforeseen critical incidents that must be resolved adequately for the projects to succeed. We posit that PMs can use PI to effectively address and resolve such incidents, and therefore the level of PMs' PI positively affects project performance. We further theorize that project complexity and familiarity contribute to its information constraints and the likelihood of critical incidents in a project, thereby moderating the relationship between PMs' PI and project performance. Information Systems ResearchTo evaluate our hypotheses, we analyze longitudinal data collected in an in-depth field study of a leading software vendor organization in India. Our data include project and personnel level archival data on 530 projects completed by 209 PMs. We employ the critical incidents methodology to assess the PI of the PMs who led these projects. Our findings indicate that PMs' PI has a significant and positive impact on project performance. Further, projects with higher complexity or lower familiarity benefit even more from PMs' PI. Our study extends the literatures on project management and outsourcing by conceptualizing and measuring PMs' PI, by theorizing its relationship with project performance, and by positing how that relationship is moderated by project complexity and familiarity. Our study provides unique empir...

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Section: An Information Processing Perspective Of Software Offshore Omentioning

confidence: 99%

Project Managers' Practical Intelligence and Project Performance in Software Offshore Outsourcing: A Field Study

Langer

Slaughter

Mukhopadhyay

2014

Information Systems Research

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“…It is thus important to understand the trade-offs under different task environments before designing organizations, such as deciding on simple or complex forms. This approach is also advocated by various contingency theorists (Andres and Zmud 2002;Suchman 1987).…”

Section: The Impact Of Task Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organizational Design and Restructuring in Response to Crises: Lessons from Computational Modeling and Real-World Cases

Lin

Xing

Ismail

et al. 2006

Organization Science

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O rganizations are occasionally faced with technology-based and accident-triggered crises that may cause costly disasters if not handled properly. Questions arise: How should organizations, with their complex processes and human involvement, be designed if they are to perform well in such crises? Would organizations benefit from structural changes during crises? From a neo-information processing perspective that views organizations as composed of cognitively restricted, socially situated, and task-oriented actors, we argue that the causes and consequences of crises may be better understood through the systematic examination of both environmental and organizational factors. We address our research questions using a rather unique approach: a matched analysis of 80 real organizational cases and 80 computer-simulated organizations. The findings show that a crisis can present critical challenges to organizational performance both externally and internally, and that there is no design guarantee that a high-performing organization will continue to perform well during a crisis situation. In addition, when organizations restructure to adapt to crisis situations, they often face the serious challenges of having to understand not only the external environment, but also organizational design traps.

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“…Because larger projects generally involve more people, coordination tends to be more mechanistic [28,33] than the more organic methods typical of smaller projects. Expressed differently, larger projects tend to use plans, standards and formal exchanges to coordinate their work whilst smaller projects tend to use stand-up meetings or co-location.…”

Section: Methods Enactmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Method Assessment Framework

McBride

Henderson‐Sellers

2011

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

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Abstract. Situational method engineering is used to create methods for use on projects. It is vital that such constructed methods be of good quality and relevant to the software development project in hand. Current capability assessment approaches cannot readily be applied to such SME-constructed methods since they do not differentiate between the three "phases" of method construction and enactment: method design, method enactment and method performance. Here, we clearly differentiate the kind of quality assessment activities that need to be performed in these three different situations.

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A Contingency Approach to Software Project Coordination

Cited by 195 publications

References 53 publications

Project Managers' Practical Intelligence and Project Performance in Software Offshore Outsourcing: A Field Study

Project Managers' Practical Intelligence and Project Performance in Software Offshore Outsourcing: A Field Study

Organizational Design and Restructuring in Response to Crises: Lessons from Computational Modeling and Real-World Cases

A Method Assessment Framework

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