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The Individual Narrative of IS Project Success

Published: 18 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Project success continues to be a concern for information systems practitioners and academics alike. Previous research has studied organizational attributes such as governance, knowledge, and individual attributes mainly focused on project leadership that can affect performance. This study makes an effort to shift the focus to IS professionals who are at the core of IS projects and explores how IS professional's individual narrative of IS project success develops. Using the attribution theoretical lens, the study proposes that the development of the narrative of IS project success is a process of casual attribution involving perception of justice, engagement and perception of project performance. Seventy-nine IS professionals from various organizations participated in a survey which measured the project performance for projects they completed in the recent past, their level engagement in those projects, and their perception of justice during those projects. Respondents represented a wide variety of industries such as retail, telecommunications, and food from both US and non-US project locations. Besides explaining the narrative of IS success, the study also reveals that this narrative has potential downstream effect on the well-being of the IS professional. The study is expected to enrich the IS project management literature by providing deeper understanding of the perception of professionals working in IS projects.

References

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGMIS-CPR'18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGMIS Conference on Computers and People Research
June 2018
216 pages
ISBN:9781450357685
DOI:10.1145/3209626
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 18 June 2018

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Author Tags

  1. attribution
  2. engagement
  3. job satisfaction
  4. justice
  5. narrative
  6. project management
  7. project performance
  8. well-being
  9. work exhaustion

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SIGMIS-CPR '18
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SIGMIS-CPR '18: 2018 Computers and People Research Conference
June 18 - 20, 2018
NY, Buffalo-Niagara Falls, USA

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