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Many information technology (IT) projects in the U.S. federal government have been plagued with failures and overruns in recent years, wasting a large amount of tax revenues and undermining the public's confidence in the government's ability to manage such resources and deliver on its commitments. What affects the performance of IT projects in the federal government? We find that prior literature on IT project management from the private sector setting is inadequate to answer this question. In addition, to the best of our knowledge, information systems (IS) research thus far has not considered how the decision-making authority of an IT unit influences IT project performance at the organizational level. We leverage several unique characteristics of the public sector, vis-à-vis for-profit firms, in developing our theory and hypothesis. Utilizing official datasets on IT projects and human resource records, we find that the more IT managerial officials and supervisors a federal bureau has, the lower time overruns it experiences in its IT projects. Interestingly, this relationship is weakened when the bureau has a larger number of ongoing IT projects. Our findings offer new theoretical insights for the IT project management literature and provide meaningful policy insights into government IT management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the challenges in management of IT projects belong to a class of problems for which a higher-order approach to a solution already exists in the form of a MIS theory. Management Information Systems (MIS) theories can be used as guidance for answering many of the important questions that occur for IT project managers. Despite this, many IT project managers underuse such theories in their management of projects. In this paper, we identify and explain the underlying reasons for the underuse of MIS theories by project managers in their management of IT projects. The underlying reasons that we identified include: (a) confusion around personal (specific-implicit) theory and scientific (general-explicit) MIS theory, (b) misunderstandings about the position of MIS theories among scientific theories, (c) the difficulty of gathering evidence and facts about the outcomes of using MIS theories in IT projects, (d) difficulties managers experience in choosing the right type of MIS theory for a particular challenge in an IT project, and (e) the ability or otherwise of current MIS theories to respond to evolving challenges of managing IT projects. The main audience of our paper is IT project managers and IT and MIS researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The project management in the area of Information Technologies (IT) has not proven to yield the results expected, as the failure rates have been documented as higher than success. One explanation for such results comes from the huge variants of what is called an IT project, so that there is no single method or "silver bullet" that can serve as an effective tool in all situations. Recognizing the complexity of IT projects and the particularities of organizations implementing IT, the present article revises the literature in ITPM complexity, and proposes a customizing method to choose tools and techniques for IT project management. The article's main purpose is the introduction of a construction logic of a method that collects data for the application of a content-based filtering technique to produce recommendations of bundled tools, based on project characteristics and organizational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this research is the development of a practical risk management technique and its assessment. This study systematically tested the correlation between critical activities and critical paths and risk scenario case management applied in project planning since its early beginning up to end. Risk management is critical to success in complex projects but is seldom applied effectively and its integration within software life cycle is missing. Based on the literature review discovered a high rate of ICT projects failure. What were the causes of these expensive and seemingly uncontrollable failures of ICT projects? Despite the review of considerable published literature on the risk management for ICT software projects and their frequent failure did not discover a satisfactory Risk Management framework and model specific to ICT software projects. In order to investigate these issues a research study was realized and as contribution a MARUNA risk management model was created. Its main contribution is that it integrates all the project planning stages. The results of applying the MARUNA Risk Management Model have been tested and the findings and recommendations are derived from the extensive body of evidence collected, in both written and oral form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information systems (IS) have considerable use in supporting large-scale communication and coordination. This is especially important in contexts such as major event and crisis management which have complex requirements on people and technology. IS facilitate the dissemination of real-time information and coordination among decision makers, and thereby the management of the entire event. This paper describes a case of management and deployment of IS for a large-scale event as an exemplar in this area. Singapore won the bid to host a major international event, the Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, collectively known as S2006. However, there were complex requirements and daunting challenges to be overcome in managing such a high-profile and large-scale event. The paper describes how the Committee in charge delivered the IT infrastructure and systems for this large-scale event with 23,700 participants from 184 countries. It suggests several lessons for IT executives in charge of managing large-scale events, mainly for planned (e.g., sports events) and to some extent for unplanned (e.g., Japan tsunami or BP oil spill crisis) events. Particularly, it highlights the need for advance preparedness, use of IS for situation awareness, cultivating relationships for communication and coordination, and the importance of vendor management and project management skills. These lessons are valuable for IS deployment for large-scale communication and coordination for future mega-events and to some degree for preparedness for unforeseen events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]