A Road Less Travelled: Exploratory Practice-Driven Theory Development Opportunities in IS Project Management

This paper reports on a high potential and under-utilised approach to developing theory to improve IS project performance, a significant and persistent problem for the IS discipline. It presents a multi-disciplinary approach to exploratory research, which is oriented towards solving problems in practice by developing new theory or adapting extant theory to a new milieu. This research approach is based on ‘looking for a gap in practice and finding the theory in the gap’. It presents examples from a program of research that has provided a number of theories to improve IS project management performance. It shows that the IS field may require multiple theories to support the management of projects rather than a single theory of project management. Introduction This paper focuses on a high potential and under-utilised research approach to improve, through the development and application of new theory, IS project management performance. The development of theory to improve IS project management performance presents a major challenge to the IS discipline since IS project management has limited explicit theory (Shenhar, 1998; Williams, 2005) and delivers poor performance in practice with slow learning over time (Johnson et al., 2001; Standish Group, 2003, 2004). This paper highlights the potential of ‘exploratory practice-driven research’, which builds on Kilduff’s (2006) comments about the opportunities for deriving