Title: Offshore software project management: mapping project success factors

Authors: Yeongling H. Yang; Giora Tamir

Addresses: College of Business Administration, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182-8234, USA ' ServiceNow, 4810 Eastgate Mall, San Diego, CA 92121, USA

Abstract: Software product development is commonly outsourced or moved to offshore locations. However, the projects often encounter challenges and the estimated failure rate could be as high as 50%. Although there are extant studies on offshore software projects, none of them uses a project life cycle methodology to analyse the factors that affect the success of the project. This paper studies project-related, outsourcer-related, and offshore partner-related factors through the project life cycle using an internationally recognised standard. The results show project-related factors are most important for the initiating stage and the planning stage while outsourcer-related factors and the partner-related factors are more important for the execution stage and the monitoring and controlling stage of the project life cycle. Overall, the facilitating knowledge areas, rather than the core knowledge areas, are more frequently discussed in literature as the key knowledge contributing to project success.

Keywords: offshore software projects; project life cycle; software project management; project success factors; PMBOK; software development; outsourcing; offshore partners.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPOM.2015.069613

International Journal of Project Organisation and Management, 2015 Vol.7 No.2, pp.111 - 131

Received: 06 Apr 2012
Accepted: 21 Aug 2012
Published online: 29 May 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article