Studying Collaborative Approaches to Improving the Quality of Management Information in IT Projects

The management of IT projects often suffers from the absence of a continuous flow of comprehensible information and a uniform representation of the desired data. This is why the quality of the presented information is often questionable. Project decisions taken at those information bases are often suboptimal and leave a feeling of insecurity. This paper proposes an approach to mitigate those problems by means of a collaborative acquisition of necessary key factors. The collaboration was carried out in 6 iterative meetings with 4 selected industrial partners. Based on the results of these meetings and Design by Research as chosen methodology, a specification was derived which guided the creation of a research software prototype for the subsequent testing phase. The prototype supported improved project-information representation with meta-tagging through keywords. Qualitative and quantitative data were obtained during testing of real projects of the industrial partners and were analyzed afterwards by a suitable mixed method approach. With 6 out of 8 positive tested hypotheses, the results show a significant improvement in the key issues, such as a continuous availability of key facts, improved reliability of the data, and less dependence on individuals during reporting. These initial results point to the fact that the path taken in this study is a promising one towards improving the flow and presentation of information in project management generally. Nevertheless, an advanced follow-up study is recommended for deriving yet more solid ground for the derivation of highly usable software support tools.