The Dark Side of Emotional Involvement in Software Development: A Behavioral Economics Perspective

Shmueli, Ofira; Pliskin, Nava; Fink, Lior

doi:10.14329/apjis.2016.26.2.322

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Underestimation of the required time and budget (also known as over-optimism) is considered to be one of the main factors associated with project failure (Harvey Nash & KPMG, 2017;KPMG, 2017;PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2014;Project Management Institute, 2018). Over-optimistic estimates have been linked to overruns in projects (Buehler et al, 2010;Flyvbjerg et al, 2002;Kutsch et al, 2011;Lang et al, 2013;Nelson & Morris, 2014), scope overload (Bjarnason et al, 2010(Bjarnason et al, , 2012Buschmann, 2009;Shmueli et al, 2016a) and over-requirements (Buschmann, 2010;Coman & Ronen, 2010;Shmueli et al, 2015Shmueli et al, , 2016aShmueli et al, , 2016b. In addition, organisations focused on cost savings may underestimate costs or select projects in which costs have been underestimated (Connolly & Dean, 1997).…”

Section: Overruns Of Is Projects and The Planning Fallacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Detection of early warning signals for overruns in IS projects: linguistic analysis of business case language

Benschop

Hilhorst

Nuijten

et al. 2020

European Journal of Information Systems

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Many Information Systems (IS) projects fail to be completed within budget and on schedule. A contributing factor is the so-called planning fallacy in which people tend to underestimate the resources required to complete a project. In this paper, we propose that signals of the planning fallacy can be detected in a project's business case. We investigated whether language usage in business cases can serve as an early warning signal for overruns in IS projects. Drawing on two theoretical perspectivesthe Linguistic Category Model (LCM) and Construal Level Theory (CLT)two sets of rival hypotheses were tested concerning the relationship between project overruns and whether the language usage in a business case is abstract or concrete. A linguistic analysis of the business cases of large IS projects in the Netherlands suggests that concrete language usage in the business case is associated with bigger budget and schedule overruns. For researchers, our study contributes to the existing literature on the importance of language usage. For practitioners, our study provides an early warning indicator for overruns.

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