Oleg Pankratz

Effort of EAI Projects: A Repertory Grid Investigation of Influencing Factors

Many companies struggle with effective and efficient accomplishment of enterprise application integration (EAI), resulting in significant time and budget overruns. Concerning project management, a major reason for failure is considered to be effort underestimation. This underestimation is an aftermath of applying estimation methods that do not account for all relevant factors influencing EAI project effort. Applying the Repertory Grid Technique, we explore factors affecting the effort of such projects by conducting 22 semi-structured expert interviews. We provide an extensive overview of 91 effort-influencing factors and their classification in nine categories, which can be used as a checklist in EAI projects.

Closing the Stakeholder Expectation Gap: Managing Customer Expectations toward the Process of Developing Information Systems:

Whereas expectations concerning both process and product are essential for information system development (ISD) project success, research has focused on end-user expectations toward the product. Based on semi-structured interviews, we shed light on the relevance of process expectations for customer satisfaction in ISD projects, concrete customer expectations toward the process, and approaches for managing these expectations. Our study provides means to manage customer expectations and thus increase the likelihood of customer satisfaction.

Influence of Communication on Client Satisfaction in Information System Projects – A Quantitative Field Study

This study illuminates the role of client–vendor communication in relation to project performance and client satisfaction in information system projects. Results from a field study with managers on the client side suggest that both process and product performance positively influence the confirmation of expectations; however, process expectations do not, which might be due to the normality of budget and schedule overruns. Furthermore, client–vendor communication wields an important influence on client satisfaction. Future research should address the contributions of different communication mediums and contrast agile and non-agile projects.

Codification, Personalisation, or in Between? Exploring Knowledge Characteristics to Guide Knowledge Management System Design

The effectiveness of information technology (IT) depends on its embeddedness into its contingent context. Thus, enabling adequate knowledge management (KM) system design requires awareness of the characteristics of the knowledge that is created. Since related insights are missing, we explore what software developers learn on their projects by conducting interviews based on the Repertory Grid Technique. We assess the characteristics of the identified knowledge and skills and derive suggestions for KM system design accordingly. Our study gives rise to challenge the common idea that KM design should be chosen according to the type of knowledge (explicit versus tacit) to be managed. Incorporating further knowledge characteristics (task domain and volatility of knowledge), our results indicate that organisations should implement a codification strategy or a strategy between codification and personalisation, depending on the knowledge at hand.

Opening the black box: Managers’ perceptions of IS project success mechanisms

Abstract In general, works on information system (IS) project success focus on either project success factors or project success criteria, neglecting the relationships (mechanisms) between these concepts. Accordingly, it is mainly unclear how success factors actually contribute to success criteria. We attempt to illuminate this black box by conducting semi-structured qualitative interviews with experienced IS project managers by applying Repertory Grid and Laddering. Our exploratory study yields numerous success mechanisms, revealing project-related motivation to be the central hub in the factors-criteria network. Factors preceding project-related motivation such as transparency, certainty, and management attention are described.