A Holistic Approach for Understanding Project Management

Abstract

Companies invest significant sums of money in major Information Technology (IT) projects, yet success remains limited. Despite an abundance of IT Project Management (ITPM) resources available to project teams, such as the Project Management Institute (PMI) Body of Knowledge, IT standards and IT governance, a large percentage of IT projects continue to fail and ultimately get scrapped. Recent studies have shown an average of 66% IT project failure rate, with 52% of the projects being cancelled, and 82% being delivered late. The purpose of this research was to provide a way for uncovering potential causes of IT project failures by utilizing a systemic and holistic approach to identify critical success factors for project management. The holistic approach has enabled the development of an ITPM conceptual model, which provides a method to evaluate the critical success factors of a given project, and their alignment with each other. The adoption of the systemic methodology and its implementation increase the potential for IT project success, and alert project leaders of potential problems throughout the life of the project.