IT Outsourcing Success Factors

In this chapter, the Success Factors (SFs) for IT Outsourcing (ITO) are explored. The research literature has a bias towards large companies, neglecting medium-sized companies. Moreover, no comparative studies regarding the SFs were found related to the size of companies. These circumstances force medium-sized buyers to turn to practitioner literature, which is dominated by guidelines produced by the providers. Therefore, this chapter identifies the research problem: the lack of knowledge about ITO SFs for medium size companies, including whether SFs for large companies, are applicable for medium-sized ones as well. The used case study research shows that medium-sized companies should use the SFs from large companies. However, 2 out of 11 studied SFs have better efficiency for large companies. This result helps medium-sized companies' ITO decision makers understand the SFs of ITO and thus closes the research gap. Implementing the right SFs should improve the ITO performance.

Towards Effective Teaching in Project Management

As a typical IT management subject, IT project management has existed as a core subject in universities for a long period. Unlike other subjects, project management requires solid experience to fully understand its concepts and methodologies. Reluctantly, many academics often face the situation that their students lack such experience, and how to ensure the teaching/learning quality becomes an important issue to solve. This chapter first identifies some typical issues with project management students and the corresponding challenges to effective teaching. Some teaching methods are also introduced together with the sharing of the author's experience in applying them in class. The effectiveness of the methods is evaluated according to the teaching improvements in terms of student feedback and satisfaction statistics.

CMMI Implementation and Results

Companies focus on software development in order to survive in a highly competitive world. They not only need to keep up to date with the changes that are occurring in their environment, but they also need to assure the effectiveness of their processes. One way to do that is pursuing high quality standards by continuously improving the development processes. In this chapter, the authors describe the project of CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) implementation in a software company specialized in information technology services for banking. The project was initiated with the aim of optimizing the software development process. Throughout the chapter, various aspects of the project are covered, such as the actions taken to implement the CMMI maturity level 2, the tools used to support the implementation, and the obtained results. These are useful and could serve as a reference basis for companies that consider the implementation of a maturity model.

SOA Governance Considerations for Successful Project Management

Information Technology (IT) projects are more and more aligned with business goals. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was introduced to achieve this, align business with IT, and increase IT flexibility, reuse of services in more manageable way. Unfortunately, healthcare organisations that have adopted SOA have yet to benefit from their investment. Industry analysts and academics agree that SOA Governance is a critical success factors for SOA projects. Addressing the substantial research gap, this chapter investigates longstanding challenges and proposes a SOA Governance framework as a way to improve IT/SOA success and guide the alignment of IT and business. The authors present a systematic synthesis of the latest research findings and professional experience on SOA Governance considerations for successful IT projects.

IT Project Alignment in Practice

IT projects live in dynamic and interorganizational settings. As the project context changes, IT projects run the risk of not delivering intended utility to the organization, despite delivering according to the project plan. There is a need for IT projects to continuously align themselves with their surrounding context in order to stay relevant. In this chapter, a pragmatic model for IT project alignment is presented and demonstrated. Results show how the model can be used as a support to traditional IT project management methods. The chapter is concluded with a presentation of three projects to further the understanding of IT project alignment in practice.

A Coordination Perspective on Agile Software Development

Achieving success in software development projects is a perennial challenge, and agile software development methods emerged to tackle this challenge. Agile software development provides a way to organise complex multi-participant software development projects while achieving fast delivery of quality software, meeting customer requirements, and coping effectively with project change. There is little understanding, however, of how such projects achieve effective coordination, which is a critical factor in successful software projects. Based on evidence from four cases, this chapter presents a theory explaining coordination in agile software projects. This theory defines the concepts of coordination strategy and coordination effectiveness and propositions explaining their relationship. This theory contributes to coordination literature by presenting clearly delineated concepts and their relationships in the form of a variance theory. For IT project management, this theory contributes to knowledge of coordination and coordination effectiveness in the context of agile software development.

Evaluation of IT Projects in the Context of Human Performance Technology

Accelerated competition, increased economic issues, and rapid technological improvements force organizations to implement IT projects to survive. Although organizations' enormous dependence on IT has increased, failure risks have also been synonymous with IT projects over the years. A better understanding of its usages and approaches, tools and models of HPT as a growing field may offer different angles and help improve the success of implementation of IT projects. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the role of evaluation methods in IT projects from the HPT perspective. In that sense, formative, summative, confirmative, and meta evaluation models are presented, and then the connection between these models in IT involving specific strategies that can be used when IT projects are established. The chapter is finalized with practical and methodological implications pointing out recommended actions to overcome the reliability and the validity issues encountered through evaluation processes, and future research directions.

Distributed IS Development Projects

The management of teams in a distributed IS development project is challenging. It has even been suggested that a new breed of managers for the management of dispersed teams is needed, especially when relationships cross national boundaries. Challenges in distributed, global IS development are understood as related to three dimensions of distance: geographic, temporal, and cultural distance, which affect the manager's ability to control and coordinate distributed IS development projects. This chapter argues that combining a relationship perspective with a success perspective is fruitful for understanding distributed IS development projects. In this context there are several significant conditions that draw the attention to the challenges in the practice of distributed IS development projects. The chapter ends with the provision of a conceptual framework addressing relational-oriented conditions for the management of distributed IS development projects. Using the framework, managers can identify the relational-oriented conditions for realizing the benefits of distributed IS development projects.

A Framework of Risk in Global IT Projects and Mitigation Strategies from Service-Oriented Architecture

Global Information Technology (IT) projects span multiple locations that are typically employing different practices, adhering to different standards, and using different technologies – at the same time operating in highly diverse cultures. Differences such as these are prevalent factors that increase risk on global IT projects. Further, they are prone to changing continuously over the course of a project, with the consequence that risk becomes highly unpredictable and dynamic. This chapter proposes a framework to characterize risks within the people-process-technology-external elements of a global IT project. The framework gives particular consideration to risks that arise from interactions of multiplicities within and between those elements (i.e. dynamic risks). The principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are adopted to propose specific strategies for mitigation of these dynamic risks. Two case studies further illustrate how those strategies can mitigate the risks.

Agile Project Management

Agile project methods are said to encourage flexibility and efficiency in Information Systems Development projects. The questions of how, why, and in what contexts agile practices work remain to a large extent unanswered by research. The authors argue that contemporary theory on human motivation and creative work, such as the Self-Determination framework (Deci & Ryan, 1985) and the Progress Principle (Amabile & Kramer, 2011), should be applied in such research. Using the Progress Principle as the primary theoretical lens, the authors present an evaluation of one of the popular agile methods, namely Scrum (Schwaber, 2004). Findings from an ongoing research project on agile praxis indicate that the implementation of agile practices may be instrumental in fostering a motivational culture conducive to a heuristic as well as creative performance. This analytical approach contributes to a better understanding of the aspects of the agile practices that are critical to a useful implementation.