Approaches and Methods for Individual Performance Assessment in Information Systems Projects

Handbook of Research on the Role of Human Factors in IT Project Management

Introduction

In order to be successful in an increasingly competitive business environment, organizations have to manage their human resources effectively and efficiently (Pereira, Varajão, Sá & Silva, 2019). To be able to deal with the continuous challenges they are subjected to, modern organizations make all the efforts to attract the best people. The fact is, more and more, organizations performance is intimately dependent on the competences, skills, abilities and even psychological traits of their personnel. Therefore, organizations have to assure a proper management of their human resources.

The performance evaluation is an important component of the human resources management activity, bringing together different approaches and methods which contribute to improve the results of organizations. With the evolution of human resources management, it has become clear that human performance not only needs to be planned taking into account organizational objectives, but also needs to be assessed and oriented to achieve those objectives.The appraisal of human resources performance is thus fundamental in virtually all projects and organizations, and the case of information systems projects is no exception. These projects “have maintained an unfortunate reputation when it comes to success”, since most of them exhibit serious problems in terms of meeting the scope, the time or the budget (Varajão, Dominguez, Ribeiro & Paiva, 2014). The success of information systems projects depends on rigorous project management processes, in which aspects such as the involvement of top management and customers, the definition of clear objectives and requirements, an effective management of human resources, among others, are critical (Colomo-Palacios, Gonzalez-Carrasco, Lopez-Cuadrado, Trigo & Varajão, 2014).

Although people recognize performance appraisal to be essential to the management of human resources and a key factor that influences the success of organizations and organizational projects, there is little research focused on the particular case of information systems projects.

Even though the area of performance evaluation is acknowledged as essential in human resources management and fundamental to the success of organizations and projects, there is not much research that focuses on the particular case of information systems projects (Moura, Dominguez & Varajão, 2019; Pereira et al., 2019). The present chapter aims to contribute to fill this gap by reviewing performance appraisal approaches and methods which may be successfully applied in the case of information systems projects.

The study presented in this chapter is an improved version of the article previously published on International Journal of Human Capital and Information Technology Professionals titled “Performance Appraisal Approaches and Methods for IT/IS Projects: A Review” (Silva, Varajão, Pereira & Pinto, 2017), and it is organized as follows: in the following section, the authors discuss the importance of performance evaluation; the third section describes the different types of information systems projects; in the fourth section the authors present several approaches and methods for performance appraisal identified in the literature; finally, some concluding remarks and future work ideas are presented in section five.