Customer Satisfaction in IS Projects: Assessing the Role of Process and Product Performance

Abstract

Despite extensive research over the past several decades, assessing information system (IS) project success is still a challenging endeavor. While the traditional approach takes process performance (time and budget) and product performance (functional and non-functional requirements) into account, the contemporary perspective acknowledges the more comprehensive character of project success and emphasizes the criticality of stakeholder satisfaction. Continuing previous research, we propose and test a model with customer satisfaction as the uppermost criterion of IS project success and process performance and product performance as its determinants. Following recent calls for researchers to investigate the explicit linkage between success factors and success criteria, we also analyze the influence of process transparency on process and product performance. We conducted a survey via a questionnaire with IS experts in Germany. We contribute to a deeper understanding of IS project success by indicating that customer satisfaction is less a matter of time and budget and that a stronger emphasis should be placed on product performance. Moreover, our results illuminate the role of process transparency in IS projects showing that it contributes to both process and product performance.

All Roads Lead to Burning Rome: Towards a Conceptual Model of IT Project Success

“…Extant research addresses the complexity of ITPS by adopting different success dimensions [6,13]. Likewise, we distinguish between ITPMS and ITPS as two independent success dimensions, each with its own success criteria [4,[14][15][16]. This distinction bears two advantages: On the one hand, it appears not to be too complex for practical application.…”

“…Furthermore, these project failures are not only critical due to cost and time overruns or quality shortcomings, but the consequences of some of these project failures can even threaten the entire company [3]. Despite these challenges for the successful implementation of IT projects, a comprehensive theory of IT project success seems to be omitted by research [4]. To the best of our knowledge, former research has often depicted detailed analyses of success factors but neglected their interrelation with success dimensions (e.g., [5]).…”

The Role and Decomposition of Delivery Quality in a Failing Project: A Case Study

“…The factors that contribute to customer satisfaction are both time and role dependent [7,16,21,25,26,27]. For an end user, the project outcome (in relation to the business objectives) determines the satisfaction [25,28,29]. Acquisition/project management team members have a different perspective on projects than end users: where end-users and their management place significant emphasis on the project outcome, an acquisition/projectmanagement team puts more emphasis on the way a project is conducted and how defects are handled [17,18,21].…”

“…Our first hypothesis questions the relevance of Delivery Quality when this product is clearly lacking in quality. Quantitative studies [24,29,30] each independently show that when a project does not deliver the right product it can not be compensated by Delivery Quality. However, these studies completely focus on end user satisfaction in a post-project evaluation.…”

Causes and remedies for the dominant risk factors in Enterprise System implementation projects: the consultants’ perspective

“…There is a great deal of discussion concerning the criteria that should be used to designate an implementation a failure (Basten et al 2011 ; Basten and Pankratz 2015 ; Lech 2013a ; Yeo 2002 ), leading to considerable research on implementation success and failure factors regarding both Information Systems in general, and Enterprise Systems in particular. However, there is no doubt that many ES projects still face problems with meeting their original scope, budget, and/or schedule (Belassi and Tukel 1996 ; Dezdar and Sulaiman 2009 ; Kappelman et al 2006 ; Mu et al 2015 ; Nah and Delgado 2006 ; Nelson 2007 ; Ram et al 2014 ; Somers and Nelson 2001 ; Schmidt et al 2001 ; Soja and Paliwoda-Pękosz 2009 ; Yeo 2002 ).…”