Practicing What We Preach: Understanding Why Project Management Methodologies Are Often Ignored

Effective project management of software development efforts is one of the most challenging aspects within IT management today. Literature has greatly extended our understanding of project management characteristics that enhance the likelihood of software development project success. Nevertheless, a disconnect seems to exist between an individual’s knowledge of pertinent project management characteristics and their subsequent use of those characteristics. The research model presented in this paper seeks to explain why software developers don’t consistently follow through with institutionalized project management principles. This model builds on previous research by addressing temporal aspects of the intention to use – usage relationship, examining institutional factors that impact eventual use of a project management practice, investigating phenomena at the level of an individual project, and considering the impacts of faithful or ceremonial use. The result is a model that is expected to explain a large degree of variance in the project management practice usage decision.