The effect of decision style on the use of a project management tool

Abstract

Managing a software development project presents many difficulties. Most software development projects are considered less than successful, and many are simply cancelled. Ineffective project management has been cited as a major factor contributing to these failures. Project management tools can greatly assist managers in tracking and controlling their projects. However, their structured and analytical nature does not necessarily match the decision-making styles of project managers.This paper presents the results of an empirical laboratory study that examined the influence of decision style on a project manager's use of the project management tool, Microsoft Project. Project managers from eight companies participated in the study, and generated an interesting pattern indicating that significant differences exist with respect to the use made of a project management tool when the project manager's decision style is taken into consideration. The results clearly indicate that when completing certain tasks, such as developing an initial project plan, project managers preferring a more directive or analytical approach to decision making significantly outperformed those project managers preferring a more conceptual or behavioral approach, both in regard to the time taken to complete the plan, and the accuracy of the plan.

Impact of Organizational and Project Factors on Acceptance and Usage of Project Management Software and Perceived Project Success

“…Fox (1997) examined the effect of decision style on the use of project management software. He found that a project manager's decision style has a significant correlation with project management software usage.…”

“…The model has the following five variables that have been found to affect user satisfaction with IT: content, accuracy, format, ease of use, and timeliness. This model has been widely applied and found to be an accurate measure of user satisfaction (Fox, 1997).…”

Using contexts to supervise a collaborative process

“…Although their work points in the same direction as ours, they merely provide a general architecture that covers the functions that need to be addressed in this important application. Fox and Spence (2005) present an interesting study on the suitability of current project management tools to different cognitive strengths of individual PMs. Lee and Pena-Mora (2005) propose and implement the use of system dynamics in a simulation of a construction project.…”

A Mobile Agent Approach for P2P-based Semantic File Retrieval

“…Their granularity is varied, from fine-grained low data files or messages to tacit knowledge that cannot easily be formed into a document that has explicit descriptions of them. There are already many researches about better information sharing in organizations [9], [10], [11], [12]. However, their early discussions were on a static organization whose members may have different c 2012 Information Processing Society of Japan interests.…”