An uncertain business environment and increased competition have resulted in change being an inevitable aspect for modern organizations. Therefore, it's important to understand what factors have the most impact on a change project's outcome. Previous research found that as much as 70 percent of change projects do not achieve the desired results. To address this issue, research has been conducted to establish factors that are important to operationalize independent of the change projects characteristics. However, the success rate of change projects is still low and contemporary research suggests how factors that are important to operationalize are influenced by change characteristics. This study examined the relationship between critical success factors and change characteristics through an individual case study of a change project. The method was qualitative and semi-structured interviews were conducted with employees at the case company. The study found that certain critical success factors established by prior research were not considered important for the change project's outcome, while other factors, including the respondents own suggestions, were considered crucial. The study also found that certain phases of the change project were considered more important than others.

Caching is a widely used technique to improve the scalability of distributed systems. A central issue with caching is maintaining object replicas consistent with their master copies. Large distributed systems, such as the Web, typically deploy heuristic-based consistency mechanisms, which increase delay and place extra load on the servers, while not providing guarantees that cached copies served to clients are up-to-date. Server-driven invalidation has been proposed as an approach to strong cache consistency, but it requires servers to keep track of which objects are cached by which clients. We propose an alternative approach to strong cache consistency, called MONARCH, which does not require servers to maintain per-client state. Our approach builds on a few key observations. Large and popular sites, which attract the majority of the traffic, construct their pages from distinct components with various characteristics. Components may have different content types, change characteristics, and semantics. These components are merged together to produce a monolithic page, and the information about their uniqueness is lost. In our view, pages should serve as containers holding distinct objects with heterogeneous type and change characteristics while preserving the boundaries between these objects. Servers compile object characteristics and information about relationships between containers and embedded objects into explicit object management commands. Servers piggyback these commands onto existing request/response traffic so that client caches can use these commands to make object management decisions. The use of explicit content control commands is a deterministic, rather than heuristic, object management mechanism that gives content providers more control over their content. The deterministic object management with strong cache consistency offered by MONARCH allows content providers to make more of their content cacheable. Furthermore, MONARCH enables content providers to expose internal structure of their pages to clients. We evaluated MONARCH using simulations with content collected from real Web sites. The results show that MONARCH provides strong cache consistency for all objects, even for unpredictably changing ones, and incurs smaller byte and message overhead than heuristic policies. The results also show that as the request arrival rate or the number of clients increases, the amount of server state maintained by MONARCH remains the same while the amount of server state incurred by server invalidation mechanisms grows.