Metrics for Project Management Methodologies Elicitation

Introduction

From the fusion of Science and Management emerges software project management (PM) approaches. It covers management strategies, determination of scope, management of stakeholders, risks, planning and control of activities, requirements and establishment of business objectives. PM is related to Information Technology (IT), and it mostly tries to avoid significant loss due to failures (Chaos Report, 2020). It is motivated by the fact that just 31% of the projects run in the planned conditions and requirements (Hoch & Dulebohn, 2013; Andrias, Matook & Vidgen, 2018), and the critical cause is considered to be the stakeholders’ attitudes and how the risk is handled by the leaders (Berssaneti & Carvalho, 2015; Adywiratama et al., 2022). But there are several experts that it considers it is not possible to know in advance the success degree, since the evaluation is based on subjective evaluations of the involved people (Ramos & Mota, 2014; Montequin et al., 2016).

The process of PM for IT processes is complex because people and technology have multiple and diverse links with its environment. According to Lehtinen the complexity derives in dysfunctional communication (Lehtinen et al., 2014) and deviations in the project activity. The solution could be to evaluate carefully the technical team and its habits in the workspace prior to start the job. Many authors found that it also helps the application of good work practices (Fareed, Su, & Awan, 2021; Adywiratama et. al., 2022; Westenberger, Schuler, & Schlegel, 2022)

Among the best known PM in the market are PMBOK (PMI, 2017), PRINCE2 (Prince, 2009; Böhm, 2009), APM (Highsmith, 2010) ISO 21500 (ISO, 2012), SCRUM (Sutherland, 2014; Van Solingen & Van Lanen, 2014), KANBAN (Lei et al., 2015), and CRISP-DM (Shearer, 2000; Shafique & Qaiser, 2014). The main goal in all cases is the proper evolution of the tasks in order to fall within the predetermined resources and timeline.

This article introduces several metrics and indicators, many of them previously published. They are presented here as a tool-set to systematically evaluate requirements that allow determining critical aspects of the various components of PM methodologies. Typically, the most important part of project information is expressed textually in seminal documents during the management of the project. The collection of variables and their considerations, presented in the course of this research, establishes a framework for comparative analysis, where metrics allow a quantitative cross-evaluation of different methodologies. Then it is possible to get a suitability scoring for every methodology under consideration at every project stage. The metrics defined here are based on requirement documentation expressed in natural language by the personnel involved in the leading process. There are also indicators complementing the set, to decide on the adoption of one or another project management methodology.

This article presents and analyzes the state of the art in the field of generating evaluation metrics for PM methodologies. It also presents the set of metrics and indicators mentioned previously, for guiding in project management elicitation stage. Note that some metrics are compatible with the ones in the classical bibliography of this subject. But others are innovative, designed using subtler concerns gathered from traditional expert’s criteria. The following shows the state of the art in metrics and evaluation of management control methodologies (section II), presentation metrics/indicator formulated for managing the scope of a project (section III), approach and case studies (sections IV and V respectively), and conclusions (section VI).