Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation
12-2014
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph. D.
Department
Industrial Engineering
Committee Chair
Evans, Gerald W.
Committee Co-Chair (if applicable)
Alexander, Suraj M.
Committee Member
Gupta, Mahesh C.
Committee Member
Rieger, Jon H.
Subject
Project management--Evaluation; Project management--Research
Abstract
Companies implement effective project management to successfully operate in turbulent market cycles and ensure the success of their endeavors. Project management is indispensable for most industrial sectors and is employed in a variety of for-profit and non-profit organizations. It can be considered as a management method that contributes value to a variety of organizations. Many practitioners and researchers have attempted to identify the causes of project failure, the factors of project success, and the criteria to gauge this success. There has been little agreement on what constitutes project success. In response to the widespread debate surrounding project success, several lists dealing with factors related to project success have been published. The lack of agreement on the definition of project success renders the quest to identify the factors that contribute to successful project implementation moot. Without knowing what constitutes success, we cannot know what contributes to it. Practitioners are interested in recommendations for implementing project success factors and the corrective or preventative actions that should be taken if the project fails to meet one or more project success criteria. Project management and related research are, therefore facing severe criticism for not fulfilling their contributory expectations within the management discipline. The purpose of this research is to identify relationships between the project management body of knowledge and short- and long-term project success. The project management body of knowledge includes nine knowledge areas: integration, scope, time, cost, quality, communication, risk, human resources, and procurement management and five project management process groups (initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, controlling, and closing process groups) (PMBoK, 2004), while project success is related to budget/cost, schedule, customer satisfaction, user satisfaction, stakeholder satisfaction, project team satisfaction, strategic contribution of the project, financial objectives, technical objectives, performance objectives, commercial benefit for contractors, commercial benefit for customer, scope, personal growth, customer approval, profitability, and sales. This study is based on a self-conducted survey of 163 members of the Project Management Institute / German Chapter from October 8, 2013 to January 31st, 2014, who are project managers, project coordinators, or project team members. The business areas included in the survey are computers / information technology, construction, engineering, education, government, health care, manufacturing, software development, and telecommunications. Pearson chi-square tests and Fisher's exact tests were performed to examine whether relationships exist between the project management body of knowledge and project success (short-term and long-term project success). The study revealed significant evidence of relationships between the outputs of the project management body of knowledge and short- and long-term project success. The study revealed also that project success depends on the project type, project size and project business area. The main contributions of this dissertation are: (a) an empirically based investigation of the relationship between outputs of the management processes and the project judgment criteria; (b) a closing of the existing gap in the literature regarding the link between factors that contribute to project success and ways to measure it (in previous studies project success criteria and success factors have been investigated in isolation); (c) a holistic analysis of the project management body of knowledge by providing an organized view of the outputs of each project management process that could influence short- and long-term project resulting outcomes; and (d) a framework for the analysis and improvement of project outcomes by using the theory of constraints.
Recommended Citation
Boudlal, Youssef Ait 1969-, "Project management and its relation to long-term project success : an empirically based theoretical framework." (2014). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1730.
https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/1730
