"Do I Want to Have Losers In My Team?" - A Quantitative Study of Learning from IT Project Failure

Abstract

This paper is motivated by a lack of research on the learning from failed IT projects of IT professionals. It remains unclear whether they learn from failed projects and conduct more successful projects in the future. We investigate this research gap with a large quantitative dataset from a German IT service provider. We find that IT professionals learn from failed projects and can leverage this knowledge in the future. Therefore, they should not be seen as "losers", but as a valuable human resource. Our research contributes to the limited research of learning from failure in IT literature. We show that results that have been obtained in other domains are transferable to the IT domain. Our research is limited by the circumstance, that our dataset comes from only one IT company. This is the first paper that analyzes learning from failure of IT professionals and their performance in future projects.