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Aligning the project management methodology (PMM) to a particular project is considered to be essential for project success. Many outsourced software projects fail to deliver on time, budget or do not give value to the client due to inappropriate choice of a PMM. Despite the increasing range of available choices, project managers frequently fail to seriously consider their alternatives. They tend to narrowly tailor project categorization systems and categorization criterion is often not logically linked with project objectives. The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a contingency fit model comparing the differences between critical success factors (CSFs) for outsourced software development projects in the current context of traditional plan-based and agile methodologies.

A theoretical model and 54 hypotheses were developed from a literature review. An online Qualtrics survey was used to collect data to test the proposed model. The survey was administered to a large sample of senior software project managers and practitioners who were involved in international outsourced software development projects across the globe with 984 valid responses.

Results indicate that various CSFs differ significantly across agile and traditional plan-based methodologies, and in different ways for various project success measures.

This study is cross-sectional in nature and data for all variables were obtained from the same sources, meaning that common method bias remains a potential threat. Further refinement of the instrument using different sources of data for variables and future replication using longitudinal approach is highly recommended.

Practical implications of these results suggest project managers should tailor PMMs according to various organizational, team, customer and project factors to reduce project failure rates.

Unlike previous studies this paper develops and empirically validates a contingency fit model comparing the differences between CSFs for outsourced software development projects in the context of PMMs.

Existing models of critical success factors of software projects have less concentration on communication, team, project management and product related factors. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model of critical success factors (CSFs) for software development projects, categorize the success factors, finding the factors in each category and highlighting the product, team, project management and communication factors as important categories of success factors for software projects.

A conceptual model and seven categories of success factors comprising a total of 80 success factors for software development projects were identified based on the thorough literature review. These 80 factors are collected based on their importance to software projects and their repeated occurrence in the literature related to CSFs. Based on the occurrence of the success factor in the literature, each category comprising top five success factors are identified as critical success factors for software projects. Based on these seven categories of success factors a conceptual model was developed.

A total of 35 CSFs from seven CSF categories are identified from secondary research of the CSFs for software development projects. The identified CSFs include communication in project, top management support, clear project goal, reliability of output, project planning, teamwork, project team coordination, quality control, client acceptance, accuracy of output, reduce ambiguity, maximize stability, realistic expectations and user involvement. Project management, product, team and communication factors are identified as important categories of success factors for software projects.

Different categories of critical success factors such as product, project management, team and communication, which were not highlighted or categorized earlier in the literature are discussed in this current work.

This research is definitely useful for organizations working on software projects. The project managers working in the industry can benefit from the mentioned critical success factors and the categories of factors by concentration on them while planning and executing software projects.

The conceptual model, categorization of CSFs, identifying 35 CSFs for software projects and highlighting product, team and communication factors are major contributions of this research work.

Advances in information technology coupled with the need to build resilience against disruptions by pandemics like COVID-19 continue to emphasize offshoring services in the software industry. Service-level agreements (SLAs) have served as a key mechanism for safeguarding against risk in offshore service arrangements. Yet, variations in service cost and quality persist. This study aims to open up the blackbox linking SLAs to offshore project outcomes by examining (1) how the provisions in these contracts affect the ability of project teams – the work unit primarily in charge of producing the offshored service – to achieve their objectives and fulfill client requirements and (2) how differences in contextual factors shape the effects of these provisions.

The authors incorporate the role of organizational work practice differences to understand the challenges that 270 offshore project teams faced in coordinating and integrating technical and business domain knowledge across organizational boundaries in offshore arrangements. The examined offshore IT projects were managed by a leading software vendor in India and several of its US-based clients over a three-year period.

The authors demonstrate that organizational work practice differences represent a barrier to offshore project success, and that project team transition processes are an important mechanism for overcoming these barriers. Moreover, the authors find that transition processes represent key mediating mechanisms through which SLA provisions affect offshore project outcomes.

The study findings shed light on how SLAs shape software project teams' balance between activities aimed at meeting client needs and those aimed at containing costs.

In this chapter we put projects at the centre stage of firms' activities – i.e. product and process innovation, strategy formulation and implementation, capability building and learning, organizational structure and design, and systems integration (the capability to combine diverse knowledge bases and physical components into functioning systems). Based on the findings of a 10-year research programme into firms producing high-value capital goods – known as complex products and systems (CoPS) – we draw out conceptual insights about project organizing that can inform and contribute to the development and reformulation of more universally applicable formal theories of strategic management and organization.

This research seeks to investigate the relationship between knowledge diversity (KD) in software teams and project performance. Previous research has shown that member diversity affects team performance; most of that work, however, has focused on diversity in personal or social attributes, such as gender or social category. Current research targets at the knowledge level aim to facilitate the implementation of knowledge management in organizations.

A research framework was developed based on conflict theory and empirically tested on software teams in Taiwan.

It was found that KD increases task conflict, which in turn has significant positive effects on team performance and that value diversity (VD) increases relationship conflict, which in turn negatively affects team performance.

The findings indicate that task conflict can enhance team performance, while relationship conflict can reduce team performance. Therefore, it is important to maintain healthy relationships among team members.

This research concludes that KD is beneficial and that VD is harmful to project outcome in software development. It is, therefore, useful for managers to form teams whose members encompass a broad knowledge base.

This paper proposes a novel way to measure knowledge and VD in teams and reports the effects of these attributes on team performance. The work also shows that a proper level of task conflict in a software team is necessary for achieving high performance.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new comprehensive metric to successfully plan and execute IT projects. The development will be based on a study of all the variables that go into making a successful IT project.

A questionnaire, containing qualitative and quantitative response questions, to gather data from practicing project managers is designed and used in an IT company. Cronbach’s alpha is used to analyze the data and multiple regression is used to find the equation relating project success to project management success.

A comprehensive variable called Project Health Index (PHI) has been identified. Using this variable, one can predict whether a project is likely to succeed or not. This comprehensive, composite variable is calculated by using 17 other project-related metrics identified from the responses to the questionnaire.

The PHI has been calculated for the company studied. However, more studies need to be performed before it can be established that the PHI can also be used in other companies and projects. What has been established and validated is that PHI can be used in the studied company and that the methodology to calculate PHI is valid.

The PHI can be used as a predictive variable, i.e. one that can be used to take corrective and preventive actions to make a project successful. The PHI can also be used to allocate resources, prioritize the allocation and improve project management during the course of project execution.

By implementing projects efficiently, resource utilisation increases and leads to waste avoidance. Improved sustainability is the end result.

The work is original. The contents and the conclusions drawn, as well as the use of the PHI will enable IT companies to implement projects efficiently, reduce cost and enhance profit.

The paper has three purposes: the first is to provide a deeper understanding of the ideology and work practices of free and open source software development, the second to characterize the free software movement as a new type of computerization movement and the third to present a conceptual diagram and framework with an analysis showing how the free software computerization movement has evolved into an occupational community.

Qualitative data were collected over a four year period using a virtual ethnography in a study of free and open source software development and, in particular, a study of a free software community, GNUenterprise, located at www.gnuenterprise.org, which has the goal of developing a free enterprise resource planning software system.

It is concluded that the ideology of the free software movement continues to be one of the factors which mobilize people to contribute to free and open source software development. This movement represents a new type of computerization movement which promotes the investment of time in learning a new software development process instead of investment of money in the acquisition and use of new technology.

The research findings are limited by a detailed study of only one free software development project.

This paper is of significance to software developers and managers of firms who wish to incorporate free and open source software into their companies.

This research presents an original conceptual diagram and framework for how computerization movements have emerged into an occupational community.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the principal success factors of a software project structured upon the basis of the viable system model (VSM).

To do so, an exploratory empirical analysis is conducted of a set of software projects, in which the degree of compliance with the requirements set down by the VSM and the success rating of their development are identified.

The results of the study indicate that the most influential factors in achieving global viability in a software project are the local environment, the organizational units and the intelligent system. Building on those factors, a mathematical prediction model is developed, reaching an accuracy of 63.16 percent in its predictions.

The authors wish to point out that due to the number of projects employed in the statistical analysis, the results have to be interpreted with caution and are of an exploratory nature.

The authors seek to show that the VSM is an extremely useful tool for the management of software projects and, by extension, projects of a general nature. The authors therefore suggest that knowledge of VSM would be of incalculable value for managers wishing to manage projects successfully and to survive in such a complex and rapidly changing environment as the software project environment is. Its application allows us to diagnose and to detect the critical factors to achieve such success.

In addition, the research seeks to increase the universality of VSM, contributing to a better understanding of it and a better and greater formalization of it in favor of its acceptance and its practical use, seeking in this way to palliate some critical principals related to its abstraction and limited applicability and to increase its rigor and validity as an instrument for the diagnosis and the design of viable organizations.

The novelty of this study is therefore principally found in the application of the VSM to the organizational structure of a software project in such a way that it allows us to detect key factors in its success. Besides, building on the validation of this proposal through the completion of a quantitative empirical analysis, this study also offers a prediction mathematical model that relates key factors with the success of the project.

The alternative to using source lines of code (SLOC) for costing software projects is to use function points. Functional point analysis (FPA), which was first introduced in 1979, has now been widely accepted as the industry standard for estimating software size and costs. International standard bodies like the International Function Point Users’ Group (IFPUG) has been maintaining a repository of data based on projects that were drawn from 14 countries in North America, Europe and Asia/Australasia. This paper presents the results of the analysis that was performed on these data together with recommendations such as benchmarks for software projects. Project measures such as functional size, work effort, project delivery rate, speed of delivery and project duration were analysed using the statistical package, Systat. Apart from project duration, all distributions were log‐normal, thus suggesting that the results can be used for software benchmarking. Regression analysis on the data further identified correlation of functional size with other project measures that can be used as a basis for planning and estimating software projects. Further work on the repository involves other project measures such as team size and software defects.

This research aimed to explore whether different project management approaches (traditional, agile or hybrid) differentiate concerning their impact on project success, taking project success as multidimensional phenomena. In addition to this, the authors wanted to explore if specific project characteristics moderate these effects.

The authors empirically addressed these on a sample of 227 project professionals worldwide. The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of project success dimensions was done to validate these factors' constitution concerning their manifest variables. The K-means cluster method was used to distinguish respondents' profiles among agile, hybrid and traditional project management approaches. To test the significance among research groups, the research hypotheses were tested with ANOVA tests.

The authors evidenced that the agile approach has a more significant positive impact concerning the two out of five dimensions of project success, under analysis in this research (impact on the team and preparing for the future), over the traditional approach.

The research is relevant for project management practitioners to tailor the success-oriented project management approach and for academics to develop project management contingency theory.

The authors constructed a research framework to test the impact and effectiveness of different project management approaches (traditional, agile, hybrid) on the dimensions of project success in different contextual conditions (organization industry, project type, novelty, technology, complexity and pace). The paper's main contribution is to expand data on the impact of these approaches on project success and compare them with relevant results and findings of previous research.