Purpose The  purpose  of  this  thesis  is  to  identify  the  role  of positive  emotions  in  project  failure  and  how  these emotions  affect  corporate  entrepreneurs´  decision-making and motivation. Theoretical perspective Entrepreneurial Failure, Emotions, Appraisal Theory, Attribution  Theory,  Psychological  Ownership,  Psychological Capital. Empirical foundation Seventeen respondents from 14 entrepreneurial companies  were  interviewed to identify  the role of positive emotions in  project failure and  their impact  on corporate entrepreneurs’  decision-making  and motivation in subsequent projects. Interviews were conducted by phone (1), audio conference (2), video conference (3) and face-to-face interviews (4). Conclusion We  offer  a  model,  which  shows  the  three  positive emotions that were found to be experienced in project failure, namely relief, confidence and challenge and their  impact  on  corporate  entrepreneurs’  decision-making and motivation in subsequent projects.

Project failure continues to be a concern even though standards and procedures have been in place for years to counteract the issue. Many reasons for the high rate of project management failure have been purported in the research literature (Bauer, 2006; Hammoud, 2008 & Kerzner, 2002). This study analyzes the problem of high failure rate of major capital projects within Transnet Freight Rail. In addition to reviewing research literature that addresses projects failure concepts, critical success factors, project management principles, strategic alignment, skills and capabilities of project managers and how these factors might relate to major capital projects failure, the study will examine possible problems at the organizational and functional level that might be contributing to the high failure rate of major capital projects within TFR. / Graduate School of Business Leadership / M.B.A.

Companies have invested large amounts of money on information systems development. Unfortunately, not all information systems developments are successful. Software project failure is frequent and lamentable. Surveys and statistical analysis results underscore the severity and scope of software project failure. Limited research relates software structure to information systems failures. Systematic study of failure provides insights into the causes of IS failure. More importantly, it contributes to better monitoring and control of projects and enhancing the likelihood of the success of management information systems. The underlining theories and literature that contribute to the construction of theoretical framework come from general systems theory, complexity theory, and failure studies. One hundred COBOL programs from a single company are used in the analysis. The program log clearly documents the date, time, and the reasons for changes to the programs. In this study the relationships among the variables of business requirements change, software complexity, program size and the error rate in each phase of software development life cycle are tested. Interpretations of the hypotheses testing are provided as well. The data shows that analysis error and design error occur more often than programming error. Measurement criteria need to be developed at each stage of the software development cycle, especially in the early stage. The quality and reliability of software can be improved continuously. The findings from this study suggest that it is imperative to develop an adaptive system that can cope with the changes to the business environment. Further, management needs to focus on processes that improve the quality of the system design stage.

Project failure continues to be a concern even though standards and procedures have been in place for years to counteract the issue. Many reasons for the high rate of project management failure have been purported in the research literature (Bauer, 2006; Hammoud, 2008 & Kerzner, 2002). This study analyzes the problem of high failure rate of major capital projects within Transnet Freight Rail. In addition to reviewing research literature that addresses projects failure concepts, critical success factors, project management principles, strategic alignment, skills and capabilities of project managers and how these factors might relate to major capital projects failure, the study will examine possible problems at the organizational and functional level that might be contributing to the high failure rate of major capital projects within TFR. / Graduate School of Business Leadership / M.B.A.

The considerable failure rate of information technology (IT) projects remains a problem for many organisations and impacts their ability to successfully participate in the digital economy. Previous root cause analysis identified project complexity as one of the key factors in and of IT project failure. The purpose of this research was therefore to critically examine complexity in IT projects. In contrast to earlier positivist research on complexity, this study was built on a critical realist perspective to better understand the underlying structures and mechanisms behind what individuals within IT projects perceive as being "complex".A qualitative research design was chosen with a series of semistructured in-depth interviews with IT project practitioners as the data collection method. The research identified four internal variables (experience, stress, frustration, and motivation) and three external variables (communication, expectations, and support) which interact with perceived complexity. These findings were synthesised into a conceptual model of perceived complexity in IT projects. In addition, the findings indicated that the role of an individual (project sponsor, project manager, project team member) influences perceived complexity. Through the identification of previously hidden mechanisms within IT projects, the study extends the body of knowledge about IT project complexity. In addition, the identified mechanisms were combined with typical situations in IT projects. The outcome, which represents the study's contribution to practice, are practice-orientated guidelines for handling complexity in IT projects which aims to support IT project professionals and organisations to better manage complexity. The study therefore provides valuable contributions to the theory and practice of IT project complexity.

Approximately half of the information systems (IS) projects implemented each year are considered failures. These failed projects cost billions of dollars annually. Failures can be due to projects being delivered late, over-budget, abandoned after significant time and resource investment, or failing to achieve desired results. More often than not, the failure of a project is not due to technical issues, but due to social and business-related problems. These issues can include a communication breakdown and lack of participation by project stakeholders; lack of a business case and success criteria for a project; failure to review project status, delays and revisions; and unrealistic schedules. While educators cannot address the issue of project failure in information systems directly, they can target the need to build collaboration skills and sensitivity to project business and social issues in students. The building of these skills and sensitivities can lead to more effective project team members and managers. Conversely, there is little evidence that higher education prepares students to be collaborators. One goal of this research was to determine to what extent students demonstrated group knowledge construction through online discussion of project issues presented in a real-world business scenarios. The Interaction Analysis Model for Examining Social Construction of Knowledge in Computer Conferencing (IAM) was chosen to measure group knowledge construction through discussions in a series of project problem scenarios. A second goal was to determine to what extent the knowledge construction through group discussion increases students' perceived level of awareness of information systems projects' social and business issues. Both goals of this research were realized to some extent. This study demonstrated that by the use of scenarios to expose students to typical social and business causes of failure in information systems projects, awareness of these issues could be enhanced between the pre-test and post-test groups. This study also demonstrated that through participation in discussion groups, individuals can demonstrate significant growth in collaboration skills. Further research should examine a population that has more balance with regard to gender of the participants, and should consider the influence of "guided reflection" provided by instructors.

Context: Numerous studies have demonstrated that information technology (IT) projects are more complex than other types of projects and suffer more from budget overruns and frank project failures. The software industry is becoming ever complex, despite efforts to introduce higher-level programming languages and object-oriented programming. In particular, constant specification and requirements changes, which are typical of any software project, make completion and completion on budget difficult. In order to provide quality products and meet customer needs, methods to accommodate this are required. As an alternative to the traditional “waterfall” methods, which required specifications freezing in order to work, agile methods were developed. These methods accommodate changes in all phases of the project. Even with such methods, the ratio of failed to successful projects remains high.Objectives: To determine which factors affect the success of a project using agile methods, and to identify those factors that are priorities for ensuring project success.Method: A literature search was conducted, and a number of interviews were conducted at three different companies. Along with the interviews and the literature research, a technical analysis was also made with the help of Visual Studio and NDepend. After the literature search and the data collection were complete, an evaluation and synthesis of the various factors was done.Result: There are 21 different factors that affect the success of a software project.Conclusion: According to the literature, there are four factors that dominate over the other 17: project management, project scope, time, and budget. According to the interviews conducted, 11 of the 21 factors are critical, and two of them, project management and project scope, were also identified in the literature as critical. As these two were identified in both the literature and the interviews as critical, they should be accorded highest priority, while also taking the other 19 factors into account.

As the complexity of systems increases, so does what can go wrong with them. For example, the United States Air Force selected McDonnell Douglas’ design for the F-15 Eagle fighter aircraft in 1967 and the aircraft’s first test flight was in 1972, 5 years later. In contrast, the US military selected Lockheed Martin as one of two companies to develop the F-35 Lightning II in 1997 and its first flight was in 2006, 9 years later, and the first production aircraft had its first flight in 2011, 14 years after the selection. This complex program’s problems have been well-documented by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and have contributed to the project’s long lead time and skyrocketing budget. GAO reports on other military projects reveal that problems the F-35 project has experienced are shared among all of these projects. In this dissertation I posit that similar problems plague all complex systems engineering projects and that a combination of these problems may lead to negative consequences, such as budget and schedule exceedances, quality concerns, not achieving mission objectives, as well as accidents resulting in loss of human life.<div><br></div><div>Accidents, or unexpected events resulting in loss, have been well-studied over time and we currently have sophisticated theories that help explain how they occur. The leading theory is that most accidents are a result of an accumulation of “mundane” errors at an organization, and that these errors are similar across industries. However, these mundane errors, such as failing to follow procedures and poorly training personnel, occur in all companies, such as companies that design and manufacture military aircraft. My theory is that these mundane errors accumulate in all organizations and result in many different kinds of systems engineering failures, including failures traditionally referred to as “accidents” that result in loss of life, as well as other types of failures which I refer to as “project failures”.<br></div><div><br></div><div>What can be learned from these systems engineering failures? In this dissertation, I begin by mining publicly-available reports to determine whether seemingly dissimilar failures, accidents and project failures, share common causes. I then explain the similarities and dissimilarities between these causes and provide examples from the failures I studied. To help provide systems engineers with actionable advice on these common causes, I describe how I linked the causes to recommendations from accident reports in a cause-recommendation network. I then discuss the results of interviews I held with systems engineers to determine whether the problems I identified in past failures occur in similar ways to the problems they have encountered on their projects. I also discuss the criticisms these systems engineers have about systems engineering education based on the tasks their newly-hired systems engineers struggle with. I explain how I used what I learned about problems in systems engineering that lead to failures to develop survey questions designed to gauge whether systems engineering education at Purdue prepares students to identify and fix these problems. Then, to help systems engineers learn from the data I collected and solve the problems they encounter on their projects, I describe how I built an interactive, web-based tool that presents expert advice on systems engineering failures. I finally explain the results from feedback I received from experts and novices in systems engineering to determine whether this tool could be useful for engineers in this context.<br></div>

Project managers are important to organizational performance and survival because of their role in managing, controlling, and steering organizational projects to success. Research has shown that project failures are globally pervasive due to the shortage of experienced and well-skilled project managers. The purpose of this descriptive correlational study was to improve the current understanding of the relationships among project managers' project management experience, self-efficacy, and project success, for which the research questions were focused on in addition to the role of project management experience on self-efficacy and project success. The theoretical framework was based on the social cognitive theory. This study involved a nonexperimental research design with a survey to collect data. Purposive sampling was used to recruit 51 Canadian-based Project Management Institute certified project managers with experiences in IT projects. The assessment of the role of project management experience on self-efficacy and project success was achieved through multiple linear regression. Results indicated significant relationships among project management experience, self-efficacy, and project success and that project management experience did not mediate the relationship between self-efficacy and project success. The results may assist organizational leaders to better understand the holistic implications of project managers' project management experiences with project success as well as the role of self-efficacy on project success. The positive social change implications of this study include greater project success and decrease project risks due to ineffective project management. Improved project success may enhance the economic prosperity of organizations, employees, and the community.

Software industry is growing day by day and software is going more complex and diverse with increase in cost and rate of failure. This increase in size and complexity of software projects has negative impact on the software productivity, schedule and effort. Organizations are demanding high quality products to increase their productivity and profits. It is common that they are facing some serious problems even after spending a large sum of money. So, its alarming situation and the concerned parties should take effective steps to resolve software project failure problem. Above all this, we are facing a high rate of software failure putting software industry on stake. This study revolves around the core issue of finding the root causes of software project failure with respect to organizational factors. In this, I have tried to find the organizational factors contributing towards the failure of software projects. I have done this study with the help of literature review and questionnaire survey. There could be one or several factors responsible for the software projects failure, which are mentioned in chapter two. I have slightly touched the Information Technology for digging deep into the failure and for understanding this phenomenon. Software failure is the biggest challenge faced by IT as well as business people. There is strong need to find the root causes of software project failure and mitigate them. For controlling this failure problem management can perform its role and I have discussed the role of management in defining, measuring, controlling and implementation of software projects. A project is considered failure when it is not able to show the anticipated results and it is happened when team is not able to fulfill the requirements of the project e.g. overruns time, overruns resources, lack of conformance with initial requirements specifications. I have tried to find out the answers of my research questions through literature review and empirical study. Root causes of software project failure are presented and validated through literature review, data analysis, discussion, and findings. A comprehensive analysis of empirical data and discussion will give you the insight into the problem and my effort to sort out them in a precise way. For the purpose of knowing the solution of this study, I will refer you towards the conclusion and recommendation. The concerned or interested people can get benefit from this research study and definitely it will help them to avoid software project failure. The contribution of the research is twofold. First, it will be helpful for the software making professionals/companies and secondly, it will be helpful for decision makers/users (Organizations), when they are going to buy or implement a software project for enhancing their productivity. / This study revolves around the core issue of finding the root causes of software project failure with respect to organizational factors. In this study, I have tried to find the organizational factors contributing towards the failure of software projects. Study is comprises of literature review and questionnaire survey. There could be one or several factors responsible for the software projects failure. I have finalized some important causes of software failure on the basis of literature review and empirical study in chapter two. Further these finalized causes of software project failure are again validated with the help of questionnaire survey in chapter four. I have presented a comprehensive analysis of the gathered data from respondents. For avoiding any aspect of the analysis, I have further added a detailed discussion on data gathered through survey. I have slightly touched the Information Technology with respect to management’s role in software project development. Information Technology is playing a very vital role in today’s organizations for competing on world level. Software failure is the biggest challenge faced by IT as well as business people. In this way, software failure is very important issue for software development firms as well as buyer and user firms. There is strong need to find the root causes of software project failure and mitigate them. In currant age, the effective use of IT is a success factor for any organization. It is only possible if we link IT with organizational goals. Business and IT managers need to learn that how they can measure, manage and justify technology as a business matter. The example of ideal organization is that which gives value to the collaboration, openness, and communication. The insight gain through this research is the basis for describing the solution for software failure problem and it is presented in chapter six (Conclusion and Recommendations) briefly. The concerned parties will be able to get the benefits from this study to avoid the failure problem. The contribution of this research is twofold. First, it will be helpful for the software making professionals/companies and secondly, it will be helpful for decision makers/users (Organizations). Especially, when they are going to buy or implementing a software project for enhancing their productivity.