Pre-project partnering impact on an information system project, project team and project manager
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2002 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved 0960-085X/02 $15.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/ejis
Pre-project partnering impact on an information system project, project team and project manager JJ Jiang1, G Klein2* and R Discenza2 1
University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA; 2University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA Information system (IS) managers have long recognised the need to use project management approaches in the design and delivery of their system development projects. The result has been the widespread use of project teams headed by a project leader or manager. However, given the fact that there has been a low success rate for IS projects, there is a growing need to seek out new methods and controls for projects. One approach involves the practice of altering the project environment prior to the commencement of project tasks. To determine whether such pre-project activities may be effective, a model is proposed and tested relating the activities to the performance of the project manager and characteristics of an effective project team. Data from a sample of 186 project team members indicate that the pre-project activities lead to more effective teams and managers and eventually to project success. Thus, it is important that organisations begin work on projects at an earlier stage. European Journal of Information Systems (2002) 11, 86–97. DOI: 10.1057/palgrave/ejis/3000420
Introduction Projects are a major process structure for accomplishing many things in organisations (Peters, 1999). A project is a nonroutine, complex, one-time effort limited by budget, resources, time and performance specifications designed to meet customer needs (Gray & Larson, 2000, p. 4). Projects are accomplished by teams, where a project team is a group of individuals responsible for completing the project work. The project team is assigned to a project manager, or leader, for the duration of the IS development. Individuals on the team typically bring different expertise, priorities, agendas and standards to a project. While there are obvious challenges to the project management type of organisation, researchers and practitioners report that IS managers utilise this form of structure in their organisations extensively because this approach has been successfully used to organise the development of new software and hardware projects while satisfying customer needs (Schwalbe, 2000). The project team and the project manager are the two crucial components to implementing projects. Each component must be effective to promote the chances of the project being successful. However, the variety of views in the project team often leads to conflict in tasks and personalities (Chan, 1989). The project manager is often powerless to remove the conflict because s/he does not hold direct authority over all members of the project *Correspondence: G Klein, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, P.O. Box 7150, Colorado Springs, CO 80933-7150, USA Email: gklein얀uccs.edu
team. Thus, building a cohesive, motivated pr
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