یک تحقیق تجربی از عوامل موثر در کنترل عوامل شکست در پروژه IT

IT project managers may sometimes continue to pour more resources into a failing project, a phenomenon known as ‘escalation of commitment’. If project managers believe that the failing project is under their control, they may be more likely to recommend continuation of a failing project. An experiment using a computer simulated task investigated the influence of self-efficacy and project risk characteristics on perceived control over a failing IT project. The study found that participants with higher task-specific self-efficacy were likely to perceive greater control over a failing project even when the project risk factors were less within their control.

Academic researchers [10] and [17] as well as journalists [11] and [24] have documented several IT projects that were not terminated despite showing signs of failure. Such projects may eventually be abandoned at a much later stage after even more resources are poured into the project. One study reports that 35% of failing IT projects were abandoned only after the implementation stage [13]. Researchers have termed this phenomenon ‘escalation of commitment’ [8] and [28]. A survey of IS auditors found that about 30–40% of IT projects showed some degree of project escalation [19]. If a decision to discontinue such projects had been taken earlier, it could have saved considerable resources.

The study shows how project factors may interact with behavioral factors in influencing decision making in IT projects. Task-specific self-efficacy was found to influence perceived control over the project. This means that project managers should be careful in assessing their degree of control over the project. Project managers may get heavily influenced by their past success and their classification of the project risk factors in terms of the controllability of risk factors. When a project is on the path of failure, project managers may continue to believe that things are under their control and that the project could be turned around even when the project risk factors are less within their control. Project managers in such situations may wait longer to determine whether the project should be terminated or not.