Title: Projects as temporary organisations: insights from requirement volatility management practices

Authors: Rahul Thakurta

Addresses: Xavier Institute of Management, Xavier Square, Bhubaneswar – 751 013, India

Abstract: Projects represent a form of temporary organisation having specific contexts. The nature of the project environment is thus expected to influence selection of project management strategies and project outcome. Using a combination of interviews and survey in two phases, we investigate the phenomena by focusing on usage of software project management approaches under requirement volatility. Analysis of survey results based on responses from 82 software professionals belonging to India identifies 13 different approaches to managing software projects under requirement volatility. The usage of these approaches was found to be contingent on the project environment, thus refuting suggestions pertaining to adoption of best practices in similar situations. The results are expected to benefit practitioners, and promote further discussions in the area.

Keywords: requirement volatility; software project management; contingency theory; temporary organisations; volatility management; software development; India.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPOM.2015.069617

International Journal of Project Organisation and Management, 2015 Vol.7 No.2, pp.184 - 202

Received: 22 Dec 2011
Accepted: 06 Nov 2012
Published online: 29 May 2015 *

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