Why Projects Fail: Knowledge Worker and the Reward Effect
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Why Projects Fail: Knowledge Worker and the Reward Effect Yoav Gal & Efrat Hadas
Received: 25 June 2013 / Accepted: 11 October 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract The purpose of this article is to show that a vital and critical element may be missing when discussing project management. This element refers to the reward effect and to the coordination between information flow and organizational processes. The average organizational reward system causes a knowledge worker to reject almost all project management initiatives, which is one of the reasons that a significant proportion of many projects fail. The importance of understanding the reward effect lays in its possible contribution toward the development of management tools which may help an organization better manage its project management initiatives. For coordination between information flow and organizational processes, the three following variables must be controlled within prescribed ranges: the number of dependent editing transitions that the data must undergo during the management process, the delay time for data values reaching the decision maker, and the availability of the information systems. Keywords Information quality . Project management . Organizational processes . Rewards . KM initiatives
Introduction When a specific project fails, is it really a failed management initiative? Does the average senior manager, after spending so much time and effort working his way up the ladder, really want to analyze what went wrong? Does he really want to share his knowledge with others? Could it be that many organizations are taking a great interest Y. Gal (*) Bina, B.Y. Nihul LTD, POB 17, Gidona, Israel 1912000 e-mail: [email protected] E. Hadas Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Investment Financing Department, Director, Economy and Quality Management, POB 30, Beit Dagan, Israel 50200 e-mail: [email protected]
J Knowl Econ
in the idea of “best practices” of project management and launching various initiatives and programs simply because it looks good? A significant proportion of such initiatives will indeed fail anyway (Gal 2004) and the real issue is then, how to handle those initiatives that might turn out to be successful. It is common knowledge that a high percentage of all such programs will fail to have any real impact, for one reason or another. However, attention has been paid to why these initiatives fail but rarely does one learn about the inability of an organization to understand why projects succeed and how to make the best out of them (Gal 2013; Gal 2012a). Knowledge sharing is a key factor in minimizing failure occurrences. But knowledge sharing is an innovative process that requires being aware of knowledge needs and making knowledge available to others by constructing and providing a technical and systematic infrastructure. Rogers (1995) was the first to develop the concept of diffusion of innovations. In this concept, innovations were defined as ideas or practices perceived as new by practition
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