Assessing the Role and Effectiveness of Project Management Software in International I.T Projects - Research Proposal Example

Dissertation Proposal- Assessing the Role and Effectiveness of Project Management Software in International I.T Projects [Research Methodology] [22-08-2008] University Student Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 2-Background 4 7-References 16 1- Project Title: Assessing the Role and Effectiveness of Project Management Software in International I.T Projects The technology industry has established poor symbols on its capability to distribute flourishing projects on time and on financial plan. According to (Sribar & Passori) 72% of al IT developments are not on time, over resources, lack functionality, or are by no means delivered as considered. (Varley, 1995) recommended that reduced communications, impractical prospect, competing programs, confrontation to alternation, and be short of decided upon metrics are key contributors to development failure. These matters are not the troubles, but rather are suggestive of poor project administration discipline. The source reason of unfortunate project management, according to (Varley, 1995) is often attributable to deprived plan management methods, unproductive project team arrangement (team risks), having less customer (end-user) project contribution, and unmanaged scope modifications. Justifiably, technology is most frequently not to responsibility for the scheme breakdown. To a certain extent, it is the human and managerial dynamics that go skewed throughout the completion of a technology alters. While in attendance has been a great deal conjecture and incomplete investigate concerning the reason of project breakdown, there has not been a great deal examination concerning tools and methods technical project directors can make use of to avoid (or minimize) the properties of these characteristic project drawbacks. This Dissertation Proposal reports upon the incorporating Project Management Software in International I.T Projects and there role and effectiveness in the qualitative, better production and support for those international IT projects. A qualitative action research examination on the better effect of Organizational Effectiveness (OE) by the use of tools in IT projects. The study was performed in a master-level IT project management course obtainable at a most important research university. The consequences of the research authenticate the effectiveness of Organizational Effectiveness (OE) tools and results in IT project organization and check with. The study deliberates the efficiency of the international IT Organizational Effectiveness approach, project time, team approval, and client approval on business knowledge projects. Make utilization of a participatory action investigate model, the knowledge set up that organizational efficiency tools create important dissimilarity in a diversity of project management extent. Team efficiency ratings were obtained from team associates and outside corporate raters. Results specify a important association flanked by certain aspects of team efficiency and the employ of managerial effectiveness tools. The insinuation of this study may make bigger further than the project management border and might be appropriate to additional group surroundings where managers effort to result organizational change. 2- Background Dimensions of Information systems (IS) success is classified into six categories: quality, use, user satisfaction, individual impact and organizational impact (Delone & McLean, 1992). These categories are valid for project management software systems success, too. According to their model, system quality and information quality jointly affect both use and user satisfaction. While use and user satisfaction have positive or negative impact on the other, use and user satisfaction are direct antecedents of individual impact. Lastly, this impact on individual performance eventually affects organizational performance. Furthermore, up to now, lots of studies have been conducted about critical success factors of Project Management Software systems to find out why these projects fail. Within these studies, the factors that are found to be critical are: Top management support (Al-Mashari, Al-Mudimigh, & Zairi, 2003), users training (Somers & Nelson, 2003), project communication (Gyampah & Salam, 2004), project management (Umble et al., 2003), integration of systems (Al-Mashari et al., 2003), cultural differences (Welti, 1999), user acceptance (Amoako-Gyampah, 1999), project management software package selection (Somers & Nelson, 2004), legacy systems (Umble et al., 2003), process reengineering activities (Yusuf, Gunasekaran, & Abthorpe, 2004) and customization of project management software(Al-Mashari et al., 2003; Somers & Nelson, 2004). Unless the organizational context and the information technology are made compatible, waiting for people to use new technologies will not be more than an expectation. There are often significant gaps between the functionality offered by Project Management Software systems and the one required by the adopting company (Sheu, Chae, & Yamg, 2004; Soh, Kien, & Tay-Yap, 2000). If firms adopt systems that do not meet their business strategies and attempt to configure these systems to meet their own needs, this tailoring greatly adds to the risks with project management software implementations. Regarding that organizational fit and adoption of project management software system is very important in implementation of modern large-scale Project Management Software rise systems (Yusuf et al., 2004). Hong and Kim (2002) proposed a model about that issue. With their model they claimed that organizational fit of Project Management Software systems and organizational resistance plays an important role on project management software implementation success. Kerimoglu and Basoglu (2006) extended this fit approach from a newer perspective. They suggested that fit between technology, organization and user avoid utilization problems. Alternatively Worley, Chatha, Weston, Aguirre, & Grabot (2005) focused on the integration of the human resource characteristics in business processes, which is a key issue for the project management software adoption and optimization phases. As they suggested, managing the adoption of an project management software system by its users is a difficult challenge, which requires evolving both the system through interface adaptation and the people by defining clearly their role within consistent and optimized processes. On the other hand, Somers and Nelson (2003) also claimed that Project Management Software systems and organization may become compatible through integration mechanisms consisting of business driven implementation, project management and structure, organizational adaptation and package adaptation. Furthermore, the term “organizational memory mismatches” was described to define disparities between organizational memory contents, enterprise resource Planning systems and related contents like in other media such as individuals memories (Stijn and Wensley, 2003). Little attention was paid to these mismatches. However, these challenges are important cues to identify both challenges and opportunities for success. The cores of these studies intersect at one point which is Business Process Reengineering (BPR). The incompatibility of features with the organizations information needs and business processes is a crucial problem associated with implementing any packaged software (Janson & Subramanian, 1996; Lucas, Walton, & Ginzberg, 1988; Soh et al., 2000). This problem can only be solved by adapting the organization to the package through extensive BPR (Kremers and Van Dissel, (2000); Soh et al., 2000). BPR was described as “the fundamental rethinking and radical design of business processes to achieve dramatic improvement in critical, contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed” (Hammer & Champy, 1993). BPR has a range of activity. As well as improving the efficiency of an individual company success, BPR can be envisaged as a hierarchy of business reconfiguration, from local exploitation through internal integration and business process redesign to business network redesign and ultimately business scope redefinition (Venkatraman, 1991). However, achieving BPR is as hard as implementing an enterprise resource planning systems, but it is a must to realize optimization of enterprise resource planning systems. It is found out that many firms that have experienced success with project management software, have comprehensively reengineered their organizational processes and structures as a method for enternterprise Resource Planning rise-wide transformation (Mische & Bennis, 1996). Business Process Change (BPC) theory is stated to be beneficial to organizations while reengineering their processes (Kettinger, Guha, & Teng, 1995). BPC is an organizational initiative to design business processes to achieve significant improvement through changes in the relationships between management, information technology, organizational structure, and people. As well as BPR, customization is also an essential, lengthy, and costly aspect in the compatibility of enterprise resource Planning systems and the organizational processes (Yusuf et al., 2004). It became a major specialty of many vendors and consulting companies for the satisfaction of their customers. There are two broad approaches commonly used in the literature to study organizational behavior. One of them is the variance theory. In the variance theory approach the investigator attempts to identify characteristics of the organization, the environment or the factors that lead to organizational adoption of innovations (Dean, 1986). Variance theory tries to explain the variation in the magnitude of certain outcomes, but it tends to do not so well when the outcomes are uncertain, as in the case of project management software adoption. By contrast, process theory, which is the other one, provides powerful explanations even when necessary causal agents cannot be demonstrated as sufficient for the outcomes to occur (Dean, 1986). A common track within this theory is to develop stage models, which identify a set of stages or phases, relatively fixed in number and sequence through which organizations pass on their way to innovations. With the process theory, many theoretical models were proposed by researchers that trace the adoption at different phases. Up to now, adoption referred to the phase of giving the decision of implementing an Project Management Software systems. For example, adoption was described as one of the six stages of project management software implementation projects (Rajagopal, 2002). These stages are initiation, adoption, adaptation, acceptance, routinization and infusion, respectively. Here adoption phase comes after initiation and consists of choosing and deciding on the system, beginning implementation, making the system available for usage, beginning training activities, observing user resistance and using the system in individual units. In another study adoption, implementation and post-implementation were conceptualized as phases of innovation (Kumar et al., 2003). Past studies concluded that user resistance is an important determinant of organizational adoption and these studies suggested some ways of salvation. According to these studies, avoiding user resistance requires organizational groups to break down barriers to knowledge sharing. Project Management Software systems integrate business processes across functions and units, thereby creating a divergence in the required knowledge of organizational members (Baskerville, Pawlowski & McLean, 2000). Organizational members must understand more than just the piece of the whole that they have traditionally been required to know (Robey, Ross, & Boudreau, 2002) and must understand where and how their function fits in the entire process (Welti, 1999). Influence of organizational culture on people should also be taken into account while avoiding user resistance (Jones, Cline, & Ryan, 2004). About that issue, it was claimed that cultural, environmental and technical issues play an important role on leader brands failure in Chinese companies (Xue, Liang, Boulton, & Snyder, 2005). In addition to these statements key-users are also considered as one of the most important means of determining system success and avoiding user resistance (Wu & Wang, 2005). Besides these studies Kerimoglu and Basoglu (2005) contributed to literature by testing the effect of communication, project management and training on knowledge and as a consequence, knowledges effect on TAM constructs. They proved that training is an important determinant of perceived ease of use and knowledge. On the other hand, they also found that communication has a direct influence on perceived usefulness and project management affects both knowledge and communication. Up to now, core frameworks were constructed employed, in addition to TAM, to understand technology acceptance. These frameworks were named Diffusion of Innovations (Rogers, 1983), Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975) and Theory of Planned Behavior Ajzen (1985). However, TAM is accepted to be the most influential model among these models. TAM is the theoretical model that attempts to explain the relationship between user attitudes, perceptions, beliefs, and eventual system use. TAM was proposed by Davis in 1986 in his doctoral thesis. Since then, it had been tested and extended by many researchers. Davis (1989) and Davis, Bagozzi and Warshaw (1989) proposed TAM to address why users accept or reject information technology. TAM is an adaptation of TRA developed by Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) to explain and predict the behaviors of people in a specific situation. Attitude towards using and behavioral intention to use are common to TRA and TAM, and Davis (1989) used Fishbein and Ajzens (1975) method to measure them. Davis (1989) chose not to keep the subjective norms, because he estimated that it had a negligible effect on behavioral intention to use. The model was therefore limited to the attitude towards behavior, the intention to perform the behavior and the behavior itself. According to the model, perceived usefulness is proposed to have a direct effect on attitude towards behavior and behavioral intention to use. On the other hand, perceived ease of use influences both perceived usefulness and attitude towards behavior. Furthermore, TAM theorizes that the effects of external variables on intention are mediated by perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. Finally, according to the model, attitude towards behavior shapes behavioral intention to use and behavioral intention influences actual system use. Venkatesh and Davis (2000) added also the notion of experience and voluntariness in the analysis of the factors that influence use. The UTAUT (Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology) holds that four key determinants namely as performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions which are also effected by gender, age, experience, and voluntariness (Venkatesh, Moris, Davis, & Davis, 2003). Figure 2 Common actors of a project management software project. [Source: sciencedirect.com] 3- Aim(s) and Objectives. Aims and objectives of this research theme are to find out and investigate the effects and benefits of incorporating Project Management Software in International I.T Projects. Here it will be elaborated that how these soft-wares be able to provide the planning and scheduling advantages for the production of international IT projects. Here it will investigate and elaborated how company and there officials can feel more comfortable about the new software incorporation. Here the expected deliverables will be a research paper that will contain the different software tools and there impact on the international IT projects. It will be investigated that how these Project Management Soft-wares are be fruitful for that large IT projects. Then there is also a little investigation summary about each management software that explain it origin, motivation behind its development and its working. 4- Rationale Section: PROJECT management software adoption was also described as a complex exercise in technology innovation and organizational change management (Markus & Tanis, 2000). Some researchers assume that operations of large entities can be rationalized by the use of best practices, and can be standardized by the use of similar processes throughout the Project Management Software rise. According to them, organizational adoption can be achieved that way (Aladwani, 2001; Huber, Alt, & Sterle, 2000; Taudes, Feurstein, & Mild, 2000). On the other hand, Waarts, Van Everdingen, and Van Hillegersberg (2002) investigated perceived innovation characteristics, organizations characteristics, internal environment characteristics, external environment characteristics and their effect on a companys adoption that implements an Project Management Software systems . Within this study, adopters are divided into two: early adopters of an innovation, late adopters of an innovation. Early adopters run a higher risk, since the new product has not yet proven its value within the market. Their findings revealed that both early and late adopters are affected by these four blocks of variables that are stated above. In addition to these, the importance of the group rather than the individual is found to be essential for the successful organizational adoption of Project Management Software rise systems. A model was constructed examining the antecedents and consequences of group cohesion in the context of project management software implementation by Wang, Yeng,Jiang, & Klein (2005). According to the model, willingness to participate and commitment to learning are proposed to influence group cohesion. The levels of group cohesion, in turn, contribute to project management software implementation success which will be measured as an project management softwares beneficial effect for the adopting organization. The study of Calisir and Calisir (2004) is regarded as one of the important user resistance studies related with Project Management Software systems in the literature. This research examined the influence of interface usability characteristics, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use on end user satisfaction with enterprise resource Planning systems s. According to their results, all of the constructs have an effect on end user satisfaction. Within this study, it is proved that interface usability characteristics are important determinants of user resistance. Bradford and Florin (2003) tried to explain user satisfaction and project management software implementation success through a different model. They suggested that innovative characteristics of an organization like BPR, technical compatibility and perceived complexity; organizational characteristics like top management support, organizational objective consensus and training; and finally environmental characteristics like competitive pressure have a direct effect on project management software implementation success and end user satisfaction. After analyzing these studies and references it is clear that this field have a large scope for researchers and research. There is lot more to explore and investigate and this topic that is “Assessing the Role and Effectiveness of Project Management Software in International I.T Projects “ is best well suited in this new environment of computer added software engineering, planning and development. So for a course of master it well suited to have a research on this type of topic. 5- Research Methods The survey method of research is a non-experimental, evocative investigate technique. Surveys can be able to be accommodating when a researcher needs to gather data on trend that cannot be in a straight line experiential (such as views on library services). Surveys are utilized broadly in library and information science disciplines to evaluate approaches and distinctiveness of a broad variety of topics, from the excellence of user-system. Here in current research topic team have to investigate that effects and advantages that project management soft-wares had made on international IT projects. These things are not visible without a comprehensive survey of these IT projects companies. So research teams have selected this method as his research method. A participatory accomplishment research technique was chosen to examine the efficiency phenomenon in the project teams, mainly since both the client corporations and the educational associates had precise wants. The contribute corporations required to hold up the knowledge and growth of the scheme team members in agreement with their directorial aims and therefore, they required achievement in a straight line and indirectly weighting their behavior within the project surroundings. Meanwhile, the researchers required a chance to closely assess process and team dynamics in this project circumstance, which strength then donate towards the growth of a model of a management based project methodology for managerial success. 6- Research Plan: After the project proposal is accepted then the team have a research plane for the accomplishing this research project. That team will follow throughout the research time line. Here in this plane team have emphasize on the quality of information that can gathered in specified time line. The research plane is given below: Research plane Step No# Time line Topic 1 Week 1-2 (you can change according to your desire) Investigation about Project management software 2 Week 2-3 Facilities, qualities and working of these software packages 3 One day Discussion 4 Week 4-5 International IT projects 5 Week 6-7 International IT projects that have incorporated these Project management software 6 One day Discussion 7 Week 7-8 The benefits and major accidents through these soft-wares 8 Compellation 9 Week 9-10 Discussions 10 10 week Release Here team has incorporated a discussion day on which all team will gather and discuss its experiences and problem. This day also involve any external help program. Where team can went to any researcher for any problem solution of guidance. Team hopes that this time line can be met if the work hard and utilize time properly but there time line can be extended and contracted according to situation, 7- References 1. Ajzen, I. (1985). From intentions to action: A theory of planned behavior. Action Control Cognition to Behavior (pp. 11-39). New York: Springer-Verlag. Aladwani, A. M. (2001). Change management strategies for successful ERP implementation. Business Process Management, 7, 266-275. 2. Al-Mashari, M., Al-Mudimigh, A., &Zairi, M. (2003). Enterprise resource planning: A taxonomy of critical facto rs. Euro pean Journal of Operational Research, 146,352-364. Amoako-Gyampah, K. (1999). User involvement, ease of use, perceived usefulness, and behavioral intention: a test of the enhanced TAM in ERP implementation 3. Baskerville, R., Pawlowski, S., & McLean, E. (2000). Enterprise resource planning and organizational knowledge: Patterns of convergence and divergence. 21st ICIS Conference, Brisbane, Australia (pp. 396-406). 4. Basoglu, N., Daim, T., & Kerimoglu, O. (2007). Organizational adoption of enterprise resource planning systems: A conceptual framework.Journal of High Technology Management Research, 18, 73-97. 5. Bingi, P., Sharma, M. K., & Godla, J. K. (1999). Critical issues affecting an ERP implementation. Information Systems Management, 16, 7-14. 6. Bradford, M., & Florin, J. (2003). Examining the role of innovation diffusion factors on the implementation success of enterprise resource planning systems. International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, 4,205-225. 7. Buckhout, S., Frey, E., & Nemec, J. (1999). Making ERP succeed: Turning fear into promise. Journal of Strategy and Business Technology, 15, 60-72. 8. Calisir, F., & Calisir, F. (2004). The relation of interface usability characteristics, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use to end-user satisfaction with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Computers in Human Behavior, 20, 505-515. 9. Davenport, T.H. (1998). Putting the enterprise into the enterprise system. Harvard Business Review, (July–August), 121–131. 10. Davis, F. D. (1989). Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technologies. MIS Quarterly, 13, 319-340. 11. Davis, F. D., Bagozzi, R., & Warshaw, P. R. (1989). User acceptance of computer technology: A comparison of two theoretical models. Management Science, 35, 982-1003. 12. Davis, B., & Wilder, C. (1998). False starts, strong finishes—Companies are saving troubled IT projects by admitting their mistakes, stepping back, scaling back, and moving on. Information Week, 30, 41-43. 13. Dean, J.W. Jr. (1986). Decision processes in the adoption of advanced technologies. Working Paper, Center for the Management of Technologies and Organizational Change, The Pennsylvania State University. 14. Delone, W. H., & McLean, E. R. (1992). Information systems success: The quest for the dependent variable. Information Systems Research, 3, 60-95. Duncan, W. R. (1996). A guide to the project management body of knowledge: PMI Standards Com. 15. Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention, and behavior: An introduction to theory and research. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. 16. Gallivan, M. J. (2001). Organizational adoption and assimilation of complex technological innovations. Database for Advances in Information Systems, 32(3) ABI/ INFORM Global, 51. 17. Genoulaz, V. B., & Millet, P. A. (2006). An investigation into the use of ERP systems in the service sector. International Journal of Production Economics, 99, 202-221. Griffith, T. L., Zammuto, R. F., & Aiman-Smith, L. (1999). Why new technologies fail? Industrial Management, 29-34. 18. Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social-Cognitive View. Prentice Hal, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1986. 19. Cronbach, L. J. (1951). “Coefficient alpha and the internal structure of tests.” Psychometrika, 16, 1951, pp 297-334. 8- Appendix Appendix 1 CAD (computer aided design), CAPP (computer aided process planning), In this research team will show how project management soft-wares develop international IT projects there benefits and there role. But before that take a look at the terms that are used for the incorporating project management soft-wares in projects. Now a days we see around us a software framework that demonstrates how computer aided design (CAD)/computer aided process planning (CAPP)/computer aided manufacturing (CAM) technology can be combined with costing and business tools and made available to small and medium sized firms. There are various well documented approaches that integrate cost analysis with CAPP. The first involves providing immediate feedback to designers as they work so that the economic implications of their decisions are understood at the earliest possible time and unnecessary costs can be avoided. The second utilizes methods focused on optimizing process plans on the basis of time or cost or on some weighted combination of the two. Tool selection, process selection, tool path design, process parameter selection and operation sequencing are the most common areas for optimization in process planning. Mathematical methods such branch-and-bound for tool selection, dynamic programming for parameter selection and genetic algorithms for operation sequencing are among the examples: Below the pictures demonstrate the different fields of and organization where soft-wares or computer added software engineering works: Figure 1 Computer added project planning in different fields of an organization. [Source: ieee.com] Appendix 2 ERP (Enterprise resource planning) Enterprise resource planning is now mostly depending on software because they are now becoming more accurate and fast as compared to humans. In this section ERP new trend toward software resource planning is discussed. It is not so hard to understand why ERP systems gained so much importance in the market. In the very beginning of the 1990s, when the business world moved ever closer to a completely collaborative model, there was a high level of competition in the market and competitor organizations looked for ways of gaining competitive advantage against their opponents. However, it was not easy. They needed to upgrade their capabilities, improve their own business practices and procedures (Loizos,1998). Under that pressure, to deal with this radically changing environment, many organizations had changed their Information System (IS) strategies by adopting ERP software packages rather than doing in-house development (Holland & Light, 1999; Laudon & Laudon, 1996). At that time, the organizations needed to make sound and timely business decisions and ERP systems offered this to them (Davenport, 1998). These systems provided integration and optimization of various business processes and this was what the companies looked for (Mabert, Soni, & Venkataramanan, 2003). It is not wrong to say that ERP systems gained importance as they arrived at a time when process improvement and accuracy of information became critical strategic issues (Yen & Sheu, 2004). ERP systems are being developed continuously and nowadays they can encompass all integrated information systems that can be used across any organization (Kumar, Maheshwari, & Kumar, 2003). The improvement of the internet has shown tremendous impact on every aspect of the IT sector including the ERP systems (Lawton, 2000). This environment of accessing systems resources from anywhere anytime has helped ERP vendors extend their ERP systems to integrate with newer external business modules such as Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Sales Force Automation (SFA), Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS), Business Intelligence (BI), and e-business capabilities (Rashid, Hossain, & Patrick, 2002). This proves that borders of ERP systems are being extended continuously. Read More