Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1 Introduction
As stated by [1], the concept of Project Management (PM) refers to “the appli-
cation of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to the project activities with the
purpose of attending its requirements”. This concept along with the company
culture and other business processes (e.g. IT, marketing, financial and commer-
cial) produce what we call the outputs (artifacts) for the PM process. Outputs
are generated from different departments across the business, and are part of
the company’s culture. They facilitate the execution of PM throughout its cycle:
initiation, planning, control and closure. Examples of such outputs are payment
schedule, team member information, company hierarchy, stakeholders’ list and
technologies adopted in the company.
Nowadays, to increase the success rate of projects, it is necessary for busi-
nesses to learn from past PM practices that have been tested in different envi-
ronments. Although managing the PM process is one of the crucial parts for
the success of any project, especially when developing new systems or saving
time and money, there is no study that depicted the actual picture of companies
and their methodologies [1]. This situation is true especially for projects in the
c Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
X. Larrucea et al. (Eds.): EuroSPI 2018, CCIS 896, pp. 95–107, 2018.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97925-0_8
96 P. R. M. de Andrade and S. Sadaoui
2 Related Work
We are facing changes in different aspects of human life (social, cultural, political,
technological, and economic) and it is happening at an increasing speed. Usually
is common to associate results of projects with these significant changes [6].
Consequently, managing projects in an efficient way for an era of changes is a
difficult challenge of modern-day management [7]. Overcoming this challenge is
being prepared to manage projects in a planned and professional manner.
In the last 60 years, several standards have risen, and they have contributed
to increasing the level of PM professionalism. The IPMA (International Project
Management Association), which represents associates of many national corpora-
tions (mainly in Asia, Africa, and Europe), created its own standards (formed by
national programs developed by members of the association, the quality assur-
ance process, and a central framework) and certification program. The Aus-
tralian Institute of Project Management (AIPM) issued in 1996 the “National
Standard of Competence for Project Management”. The Government of Aus-
tralia approved it as a piece of the country’s national qualification system [8].
Furthermore, The Association for Project Management in England established
norms of competence for PM too. The same happened across the globe, like the
Project Management Institute (PMI) that published the PMBOK Guide and
the British Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) that
An Analysis of ITPM Across Companies in an International Scenario 97
published its own method. Other organizations with national-scale projects are
eagerly involved in the advancement of the project manager ocupation in China,
Japan and South Africa [6].
In 2015, Bonnie performed a search about the view and use of PM in the
world. This study was based on data collected from important companies (i.e.
PMI and the Harvard Business Review). Each one did their search with different
industries and published their results. Table 1 provides an overview of the most
relevant data from Bonnie’s study [2].
From Table 1, we can observe that the situation of the projects in the world
is not the best and this is why researchers investigate these issues. A failure in a
project means that companies will expend more time and more money to achieve
their goals or even worst, they will fail as a business. For example, the “% of IT
projects that ran over budget”. We can see that almost half of all projects expend
more money that was planned to get it completed. This issue can happen from
poor planning or for risks that were not managed right. We also noticed that
not all organization use PM according to “% of companies that used the project
management in the entire company”. With the value of 59%, we can conclude
that this discipline needs to be more widespread in the culture of organizations.
However, simply adopting a process is not a solution, as we can see in “% of
project requirements are usually out of sync with the business”. The latter means
98 P. R. M. de Andrade and S. Sadaoui
that 78% of the interviewed people think that the project requirements should
be reviewed because they do not aim the business goals.
In addition, the Project Manager has been cited by some authors as a rel-
atively new and emerging profession. It is because several organizations, pub-
lic and private, research and education institutions, and others, are frequently
seeking to study, propagate, put into practice, and envolve the knowledge, tools,
models, and methodologies employed in this field and profession [1,9,10]. The
authors of these papers were aligned with the data from Table 1. This shows the
great necessity of more studies in the ITPM field.
4.1 Participant
The primary goal here is to identify what kinds of professionals are working
with ITPM and their qualifications. One of the factors is to check how the
status of a qualified professional or his knowledge of a specific approach (though
certifications and experience) can influence the project success rate. According to
our data, 52% of participants are between 36 and 50 years old. This information
could tell us that more than a half of the participants are in an advanced position
in their careers and with more expertise to share. Another useful information
that we observed is the degree level. We found out that 76% of the sample has a
degree higher than the Bachelor level. This could demonstrates a necessity in the
market for the continuous professional improvement since, in PM, a professional
needs to go beyond the undergraduate degree to hold a good position.
100 P. R. M. de Andrade and S. Sadaoui
Moreover, Fig. 1 summarizes the data discussed previously using the age as
a division. It also includes the two primary professional certifications for project
managers: PMI (PMP, PM-ACP, and CAPM) and Scrum (Scrum Master and
Product Owner). With this view, we can evaluate the reality and experience of
each group. One intriguing data here is the link between the number of people
that managed six projects or more and the number of people that holds a PMI
Certification. If we look people with more than 25 years, are really close, what
means, according to [17], a necessity for certified professionals in advanced PM
positions. In other words, these certifications help the companies to ensure that
their professionals are more prepared to take care of their projects and to have
more responsibilities for high risk and complex projects. Another information
that we can observe here is the low adoption of the Agile Certifications. For the
our research propose (and listed in the survey as options) we are considering the
following Agile Certifications: PMP-ACP, CSM, CSPO, and CSP.
4.2 Company
Here, we identify the companies where we are getting the results from, such as
the type of industry, country, annual income, and size. With these information,
we can analyze which techniques work better for which kinds of companies.
We can also check if the industry or the location (both influences the business
culture) has an impact on the choice of methodologies. This will helps us to
better understand the universe of our study. First, we looked into the location
of each company, and we can observe that most of the participants came from
Brazil (with 40.7%). Other countries with a good participation are Cote d’Ivoire
(15.3%), Canada (11.3%), United States (8.7%) and Italy (8%). The diversity of
countries brings a rich multicultural view to the study.
Moreover, we categorized the industries of each company. We noticed that the
ITPM field is present in all kinds of industries. We have, among the participant,
a total of 30.6% of companies specifically from the IT industry, 28.7% from Edu-
cation, 11.3% from Consulting, 9.3% from Government, and 20.1% from other
kinds, such as Business Administration, Law Firms, Hospitality and Commerce.
So, we can deduce what types of practices are more present. For example, we
can state from that only 63% of companies from the IT Industry employs Agile
frameworks in their projects. This means that besides the proven benefits of
using Agile in the ITPM [18], not all companies agree that it is the best option.
Despite that, 91.3% of the IT industry from our sample have someone with
knowledge and experience with Agile frameworks.
One of the first points to investigate is whether the company has a formal PM
approach (well defined and internalized in the business culture) or not. This is
important because if companies do not have an approach, they are considered
just makers: they proceed with each project using a different process, not think-
ing about the standards and project constraints or about the RM. This will create
uncertainty about the success of the project. In other words, they do not plan
ahead their projects and just follow the orders from someone else, thus making
it difficult for projects to be successfully completed. From the sample, 70.7% of
companies have a formal approach to manage their projects. This is unexpected
since in the market there is a pressure for faster delivery of new products and
services, and at the same time companies need to save money [11,12]. This is
a difficult task without the help of a PM approach. Another interesting data is
that from companies that have a formal PM approach, 80.2% have the PMBOK
has one the components for their approach, 45.3% have a Agile Framework as
a component, 15.1% use PRINCE 2, and only 7.5% have they own specific PM
methodology. Moreover, we noticed that only 51.3% of companies checked the
project complexity. It was a surprise since we know that is necessary to check
the project complexity before its launch in order to chose the right tools and
process to achieve success [16].
We also identified a low rate of companies having a risk verification method.
Risk management is an important sub-field of PM since it can contribute to the
success or failure of a project [19]. A risk could be harmful (a threat), such as
a team member leaving the company, late payment, late approval, or problems
with suppliers. It can also be beneficial, such as new technologies or frameworks
to implement to reduce the job amount, quick approval, or low exchange cur-
rency rate to pay for resources. Therefore, it is necessary to manage risks to
avoid threats and take advantage of opportunities. From the data, only 60.7%
of companies have a proper method to manage risks. According to [1], anything
below 70% is considered as a low adoption value and as a signal that we need to
improve PM in business.
Moreover, the survey data show that 43.3% of companies have a portfolio
management. The latter is a step forward to the PM because it takes care of
all the company’s projects and prospects. From our study, we can notice that
Italy is the most thoughtful in managing project complexity, with 75% of its
companies having an underlying methodology. Following is Cote dÍvoire with
52.17%, Brazil with 49.18%, and Canada with 47.1%.
When we think about PM, support and guidelines from the administrative board
are needed to make the process flow well. Here, 70% of companies have this
support. Still, there are companies where their IT departments did not get the
necessary help to make their projects happen because they are resilient to new
projects and technologies [11]. We have some examples in the literature about big
An Analysis of ITPM Across Companies in an International Scenario 103
companies that resisted the changes, making their projects be late or archived
[5]. When companies create their own Project Management Office (PMO), they
recognize the importance of PM and the need of a different department to provide
all the necessary support and centralize processes and projects. According to [15],
“Strategic PMOs enable strategic change in organizations. (...). Some serve as a
means to standardize project-related governance processes (...). Others serve as
centers of excellence (...)” [16]. From the survey data, only 53.3% of companies
have a PMO, which could impact the projects’ standards and how the projects
are conducted. Regarding the big companies, with the annual income more than
100 million of US dollars, the number goes to 71.2%. Although the advantages
of the PMOs, not all companies are prepared to take this step further in their
organizational architecture.
In short, the importance of a well-defined PM process is crucial. However,
if we consider only the companies with a defined formal methodology, we note
that there is still room for improvement in their process. For example, 68.2%
of these companies have a portfolio management approach, and 67.9% do a
complexity study before starting the projects to obtain the rights resources. If
we consider the historical database, 58.7% have something similar and 76.5%
have a methodology to manage risks. Among the companies with a formal PM
process, 79.3% use a specialist software to manage their projects and 12.3% use
only electronic spreadsheets and text editor to do their work.
6 Profile of Projects
With the “Profile of Projects”, we can obtain information about the project
(results, approaches, success and failure rates, problems) and underlying method-
ologies. So, it is possible to evaluate which approach helped more the companies
to attain project success or to predict incidents (threats and opportunities). The
efforts of the project team and manager should be spent on managing what
many authors and researchers call the“triple constraint” (cost, time and scope)
of project needs [1,16]. We can also include the project quality as a fourth piece,
that can be affected by the balance of the triple constraint. These four “forces”
maintain a natural balance between each other in a project, which we establish
through the creation of baselines (snapshots of the project) for the scope, time,
and cost. From this point where the baselines were creates, changes in a con-
straint (e.g. costs) will be reflected in one or more of other factors. For example,
to meet a customer request for reducing the project cost, the project deadline
should be increased or the project scope should be decreased. Otherwise, we will
end up having a negative impact on the quality of the project because we will
need to hire cheaper and less experienced teams, or to use cheaper and possibly
lower quality materials, or to reduce the number of tests.
planned scope, time and cost) and 31.3% had a success rate between 45% and
80%. We consider this as a good range since the Chaos Report pointed the
average of success in IT projects in 2016 as 38% [20]. This also means that
companies that had more than 80% of success rate could be viewed with an
excellent performance.
For companies with more than 80% of their successful projects, 29.4% created
their own approach, 41.2% used the Agile/Scrum or an approach based on this
methodology, and 70.6% used an approach based on PMBOK. If we consider
companies with a success rate between 45% and 80%, we have a reduction in the
adoption of Agile frameworks (only 28.2% uses Agile/Scrum). We can observe
that the adoption of Agile could help to improve the success rate, but it is
necessary to analyze other factors such as the experience of who is managing
the project, company and project size, company culture and PM process. With
this analysis, we can state that Agile has contributed with 9% in the success of
large size companies, and 23% for medium size companies. We got this percentage
after crossing the information about the success rates and data from the previous
section.
Moreover, the RM contributed to 41% in the success of large companies, 20%
for medium-sized, and 37% for small-sized. The complexity is another factor that
we considered, but instead of the company size, we adopt the project size. With
this comparison, a methodology to check the complexity before the project could
start can have an influence of 39% in the success rate for large projects (more
than one year) and 24% for medium projects (between six months and one
year). If we based the statics on the experience of who is managing the project
for the same context (same size of project and company), there is only 7% of the
difference in the impact of the success rate. It means that with the right support
and methodologies, the experience with projects will have a small impact in
the general success rate of a project but its come as a significant impact in the
context of risk management (since this discipline becomes easier with experience
and a project/lessons learned database).
In addition to this information, Table 2 demonstrates that all analyzed factors
have a close range, which means, inside of our sample, these factors do not have a
direct influence if a project is challenging or not. Different of our expectation, this
analysis shows that we need to have new ways to identify a challenging project
besides with we already have in the literature. We could consider other factors
such: if the company has the right approach for that kind of project; if there
is all the necessary information for the scope; the culture of the company; the
right and necessary definition for the product quality; and others. We analyzed,
for each range of Challenging Projects percentage, the Complexity Approach
(CA), Project Management Office (PMO), Risk Management (RM), Historical
Database (HDB), Board Support (BS) and Training for Teams (TT).
An Analysis of ITPM Across Companies in an International Scenario 105
7 Conclusion
By examining pragmatically whether a company has expectations about the
success of its projects, it is interesting to get as much information as possible
about other projects inside (historical basis) or outside (best market practices
and literature) the company. This way we can minimize the risk, optimize the
operations and even save money. This paper presents the initial results of our
ongoing study of providing insights on how to increase the project’s success rate.
Our ultimate goal is to create a new PM approach, focused on risk management,
and based on the best practices identified in this research. In this work, we
already identified some crucial decisions for companies.
Management. According to our data, as an average, less than 50% of the
companies have a complexity approach, which combine with other factors such
as the training for teams (average of 40%) influences the challenge of a project
(how difficult it will be to manage and archive success). Is also possible to notice
low adherence to risk management. From the data presented, where only 22.7%
of the companies had success in more than 80% of their projects, we can verify
from the general analysis that the adoption of a well-known standard (such as the
PMBOK or an Agile Framework) is not a guarantee of success. The companies
need to put more effort to the Risk Management, and they need to include the
CA and TT as essential parts to the success.
We can conclude that most of the large companies are putting effort into the
PM discipline. However, some areas that can influence the success of projects are
still left out. This research is still not conclusive regarding the impact that each
factor cited in this study (e.g. complexity, methodology, training, and others)
can have on PM. As a future work, we will verify the data collected using the
fourth part of the survey and realize an in-depth qualitative analysis. We will
cross the information found in this new analysis with the previous information
presented on this paper to suggest a new practices to solve the identified issues.
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