Mission Impossible? Exploring the Limits of Managing Large IT Projects and Ways to Cross the Line

Date

2019-01-08

Contributor

Advisor

Department

Instructor

Depositor

Speaker

Researcher

Consultant

Interviewer

Narrator

Transcriber

Annotator

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Volume

Number/Issue

Starting Page

Ending Page

Alternative Title

Abstract

For decades much effort has been made to improve project management capabilities. Still, the failure rate remains high, especially for large IT projects. Our postmortem analysis of 15 large IT projects of the Swiss Federal Administration, with an accumulated loss of one billion U.S. dollars, shows that while project management deficits account for some of the failures, project failure is primarily caused by poor project governance capabilities. Based on insights gained from the initial failure analysis, the Swiss Federal Government decided to assess all its large IT projects based on our co-designed framework. Meanwhile, also private companies have assessed IT projects applying our framework. As a consequence, valuable discussions and measures have been initiated and sporadically projects were stopped. The data gained by these assessments will allow to identify patterns that promise to be a reference for governance actors and bodies what information to ask for, when to intervene, and how.

Description

Keywords

Practice-based IS Research, Organizational Systems and Technology, IT Project Management, IT Project Governance, IT Project Failure Analysis, IT Project Assessment, Large IT Projects

Citation

Extent

10 pages

Format

Geographic Location

Time Period

Related To

Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

Related To (URI)

Table of Contents

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Rights Holder

Local Contexts

Email libraryada-l@lists.hawaii.edu if you need this content in ADA-compliant format.