Evelina Ericsson

Quantifying Success Factors for IT Projects: An Expert-Based Bayesian Model

Large investments are made annually to develop and maintain IT systems. Successful outcome of IT projects is therefore crucial for the economy. Yet, many IT projects fail completely or are delayed or over budget, or they end up with less functionality than planned. This article describes a Bayesian decision-support model. The model is based on expert elicited data from 51 experts. Using this model, the effect management decisions have upon projects can be estimated beforehand, thus providing decision support for the improvement of IT project performance.

Implementing Design for Six Sigma in large Swedish product developing organisations – an interview study

As a result of the organisational evolvement towards increased structure in product development (PD), supporting concepts like Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) have arisen. DFSS provides structuring guidelines as well as suggestions regarding tool and technique implementations for PD. Companies’ need for support and structure from such a concept does, however, not always correspond to the real content of the concept. This article examines the DFSS implementation strategy in four organisations to determine which parts of the DFSS concept are being used by companies. Results show that several of the most difficult activities in PD lack concrete support in DFSS. On the other hand, many of the clearly described actions of the concept are already well-operating methods in todays product developing organisations.

A Survey of Quality Measurements in Product Development

There is a lack of definitions of clear quality measurements within existing product development literature. Several literature sources that mention measurements in product development base their a ...