نقش نظارت و شانه خالی کردن در سیستم اطلاعات مدیریت پروژه

Agency theory offers a foundation for explaining the impact of project monitoring on project success. This study applied agency theory to survey 428 information systems project managers concerning their project monitoring, shirking by systems developers, and project success. Greater project monitoring via planning and meetings predicted less shirking, while greater monitoring via responsibilities and comparison did not. Less shirking via poor focus predicted increased project success, while less shirking via loafing did not. These findings have implications for project managers and project management researchers.

Completing projects on time, within budget, and with quality is a major challenge facing today’s project managers. Project management is a risky endeavor, and too many projects are cancelled before completion while too many others exceed their budgets, are completed beyond their target dates, or lack the expected quality [1]. This problem is especially severe for information systems (IS) projects, perhaps because information technology changes so quickly that new projects are continually using little known technologies and perhaps because information systems providers and users have so much difficulty understanding each other’s needs. Agency theory offers a potential foundation to help explain why projects might be late, beyond budget, and of lower quality [2], [3] and [4]. The theory asserts that a principle (typically a manager, and in the current study, an information systems project manager) employs an agent (a subordinate, and in the current study, an information systems developer) to perform work. The theory further states that self-interest motivates the agent to work on tasks of his or her choice. One of the hypothesized relationships in the theory is that the principle monitors the agent to discourage the agent’s shirking (i.e., the evading of work, duty, or responsibility) and thereby to encourage the agent to act in the principle’s interest. Another is that by acting in the principle’s interest, the agent will accomplish the principle’s objectives. The purpose of this paper is to explain the impact of monitoring on project success. It does so by presenting and testing two broad hypotheses. One asserts that greater monitoring results in less shirking. The other asserts that less shirking results in greater project success. By understanding the impact of monitoring, project managers might better use the tool to bring projects more successfully to completion. Fig. 1 shows the original research model; a refined model decomposes the two hypotheses into ten. The following two sections define the constructs in the study and then justify the hypotheses. The methodology section describes the data collection and a data analysis section identifies the components of monitoring and shirking. After a refinement of the hypotheses, a section describes the data analysis testing them. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings and the implications for research and practice.

This paper examined the effect of monitoring on shirking, and the effect of shirking on information systems project success in the holistic context of both project implementation and ongoing use [37]. It contributed by finding monitoring to be a four dimension construct and shirking to be of two dimensions. It found that monitoring via planning and meetings appears to reduce shirking (for both poor focus and loafing), but fails to do so via responsibilities and comparison (again for both poor focus and loafing); in other words, it warns that diligent monitoring of task completions may fail to focus developers on the essential tasks and may fail to discourage them from slacking off. It found that shirking via poor focus predicts project failure whereas shirking via loafing does not; in other words it warns that effort on the wrong tasks may doom a project even if the effort is diligent. Such findings provide a basis for project managers to improve the successfulness of their projects by better use of monitoring to encourage developers to focus on the most appropriate tasks, and for researchers to further investigate and enhance our understanding of project management by studying such management using broader and more diverse approaches.