Effective Project Governance Institutions for IT Service Project Success
Affiliation: SK Holdings Company, KR
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Affiliation: Kookmin University, KR
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Affiliation: Hanyang University, KR
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Chapter from the book: International Project Management Association, . 2018. International Project Management Association Research Conference 2017.
Recently, in pursuit of sustainable competitiveness, IT (information technology) service projects have been increasingly undertaken to introduce new technologies and advancements such as big data analytics, AI (artificial intelligence), Cloud Computing, mobile computing, IoT (Internet of Things), and business process changes.
However, the project success rates of IT service projects have declined because of the various kinds of risks associated with the characteristics of these projects, such as software invisibility, unclear user requirements, the complexity of IT systems and new technologies, and agency conflicts such as different goals, different risk attitude, and information asymmetry among project participants. The profits and success rates of IT service projects have fallen because of risks and agency conflicts.
In this study, we analyzed the gaps in average profits rates by revenue group for IT service companies in South Korea by one-way ANOVA (analysis of variance) analysis of SPSS V20 statistical tool. The result showed that the average profit rate of the revenue group over 1 billion USD was twice than the revenue groups of less 1 billion USD, and the gaps of average profit rates among revenue Group 1 and other revenue groups were statistically significant.
In addition, we investigated the maturity level of project governance by revenue groups of IT service companies with FGI (focus group interviews). The results showed that higher revenue groups were the higher maturity level of project governance. Furthermore, we investigated the change of failure rate of IT service projects in a company with the application of project governance institutions. The results showed that this failure rate decreased by 14.8% with the application of project governance institutions.
We recommend the application of project governance institutions such as project governance board, project steering committee, project management office (PMO), stage-gate process (SGP) in order to increase the profit rates of projects and to decrease the failure rates of projects.