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Undesirable Framing Effects in Information Systems Projects: Analysis of Adjective Usage in IS Project Business Cases
Abstract
Many information systems (IS) projects encounter significant problems. The literature suggests that decision-makers can be misled by overoptimistic estimates. We argue that such overoptimism may also be present in the choice of language in business cases. In this study, we analyzed the usage of such framing in 20 business cases for large IS projects of the Dutch government. Our findings show that newly proposed systems are systematically framed using positive adjectives, whereas the existing systems are framed using negative adjectives. This pattern of framing may subconsciously bias the decision-makers toward investing in new IS projects.
... Students were questioned about their familiarity with and to various majoring methods, and although everyone had taken classes that used pure gain majoring systems, 80percent of the total had taken classes that used framing effect evaluation method or a combination of the two. As a result, the vast majority of our sample was familiar with both types of framing when it came to university selection (Lucas, Rosenbaum, Isenberg, Martin, & Schreyer, 2021); (Benschop, Nuijten, Hilhorst, & Keil, 2022). Findings and ideas from decision-making research are seldom applied to education, particularly when it comes to the best instructional practices and elements that impact students' decisions and performance at university. ...
p> Many students in choosing higher education majors are not in accordance with their abilities and interests. This will have an impact on students in making decisions on the choice of majors. This research is qualitative survey study with all students of the University of Riau as the population in this study, with 556 samples covering eight departments and three faculties using representative sampling technique with criteria for early students (semester 1 and semester 3). The results of the study prove that in terms of practicality and knowledge possessed by students to choose majors, such as motivation, excelling, enjoyable, easeness, preference will affect decision making (thinking process, and ambiguity). The decision to choose a major that is not in accordance with the major can have a negative effect on the student. This is something that students should pay attention to.
Keywords: Decision-Making, Framing Effect, Major, Students
Abstrak
Banyak mahasiswa dalam memilih jurusan pendidikan tinggi tidak sesuai dengan kemampuan dan minatnya. Hal ini akan berdampak pada mahasiswa dalam mengambil keputusan pada pemilihan jurusan. Penelitian ini merupakan study qualitative berjenis survey dengan mahasiswa Universitas Riau sebagai populasi dalam penelitian ini, dengan 556 sampel yang meliputi delapan jurusan dan tiga fakultas dengan menggunakan teknik representative sampling dengan kriteria mahasiswa awal (semester 1 dan semester 3). Hasil penelitian membuktikan bahwa dalam hal praktis dan pengetahuan yang dimiliki oleh mahasiswa untuk memilih jurusan, seperti motivasi, exelling, enjoyable, easiness, preference akan berpengaruh terhadap pengambilan keputusan (proses berpikir, dan ambiguitas). Keputusan dalam memilih jurusan yang tidak sesuai dengan jurusan dapat memberikan efek negatif pada mahasiswa tersebut. hal ini yang harus menjadi perhatian oleh mahasiswa.
Kata kunci: Framing Effect, Mahasiswa, Jurusan, Pengambilan Keputusan</strong
This study examines the framing of news coverage related to the increase in fuel prices (BBM) on two prominent Indonesian online media platforms, Kumparan.com and Kompas.com, during the period of September 3–7, 2022. Utilizing Robert N. Entman’s framing analysis model, the research explores how these media outlets construct and present the issue of the BBM price hike through the four elements of framing: defining problems, diagnosing causes, making moral judgments, and offering treatment recommendations. The research adopts a qualitative content analysis approach, systematically analyzing articles from both platforms to identify recurring themes and framing techniques. The study employs a purposive sampling method to select relevant news articles, ensuring that the content analyzed is directly related to the BBM price hike during the specified period. The findings reveal significant differences in how each media platform frames the issue. Kumparan.com primarily views the government’s decision to raise BBM prices as a source of public discontent, highlighting the negative impact on various societal groups and attributing the problem largely to government actions. In contrast, Kompas.com adopts a more balanced approach, acknowledging both the necessity of the government’s decision in light of rising global oil prices and the public's grievances. This platform frames the policy as a difficult but necessary step to maintain economic stability. The study concludes that media framing plays a crucial role in shaping public perception, with each outlet presenting the same event in ways that reflect their editorial stances and underlying ideologies. The research suggests that future studies could benefit from incorporating constructionist theories and critical discourse analysis to further understand the mechanisms of media framing and its impact on public discourse.
Purpose
Research on artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential effects on the workplace is increasing. How AI and the futures of work are framed in traditional media has been examined in prior studies, but current research has not gone far enough in examining how AI is framed on social media. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining how people frame the futures of work and intelligent machines when they post on social media.
Design/methodology/approach
We investigate public interpretations, assumptions and expectations, referring to framing expressed in social media conversations. We also coded the emotions and attitudes expressed in the text data. A corpus consisting of 998 unique Reddit post titles and their corresponding 16,611 comments was analyzed using computer-aided textual analysis comprising a BERTopic model and two BERT text classification models, one for emotion and the other for sentiment analysis, supported by human judgment.
Findings
Different interpretations, assumptions and expectations were found in the conversations. Three subframes were analyzed in detail under the overarching frame of the New World of Work: (1) general impacts of intelligent machines on society, (2) undertaking of tasks (augmentation and substitution) and (3) loss of jobs. The general attitude observed in conversations was slightly positive, and the most common emotion category was curiosity.
Originality/value
Findings from this research can uncover public needs and expectations regarding the future of work with intelligent machines. The findings may also help shape research directions about futures of work. Furthermore, firms, organizations or industries may employ framing methods to analyze customers’ or workers’ responses or even influence the responses. Another contribution of this work is the application of framing theory to interpreting how people conceptualize the future of work with intelligent machines.
Information technology project management practices effectively help organizations achieve IT value. We employed a semistructured review with the practice of jizhuanti by tracing the development of the research intersection of IT and projects through the works of seven influential authors. From the analysis of the review, we build representative models of the intersection and suggest open lines of research. The results unveil stakeholder integration, knowledge management, and risk controls as principal themes for the sampling subset. Future scholars can continue to delve into these areas over more complex systems, consider other categories, or open new directions revealed by practice.
Many Information Systems (IS) projects fail to be completed within budget and on schedule. A contributing factor is the so-called planning fallacy in which people tend to underestimate the resources required to complete a project. In this paper, we propose that signals of the planning fallacy can be detected in a project’s business case. We investigated whether language usage in business cases can serve as an early warning signal for overruns in IS projects. Drawing on two theoretical perspectives – the Linguistic Category Model (LCM) and Construal Level Theory (CLT) – two sets of rival hypotheses were tested concerning the relationship between project overruns and whether the language usage in a business case is abstract or concrete. A linguistic analysis of the business cases of large IS projects in the Netherlands suggests that concrete language usage in the business case is associated with bigger budget and schedule overruns. For researchers, our study contributes to the existing literature on the importance of language usage. For practitioners, our study provides an early warning indicator for overruns.
This paper provides a systematic review of the literature on behavioural decision making in projects. The field is blooming, and given the relevance of decisions in projects and the strong theoretical foundations of behavioural decision making, it offers to contribute to practice and theory in projects and beyond. However, the literature is fragmented and draws only on a fraction of the recent, insightful, and relevant developments on behavioural decision making. This paper organizes current research in a conceptual framework rooted in three schools of thinking—reductionist (on cognitive limitations—errors), pluralist (on political behaviour—lies), and contextualist (on social and organizational sensemaking—misunderstandings). Our review suggests avenues for future research with a wider coverage of theories in cognitive and social psychology and critical and mindful integration of findings and concepts across three schools.
Corporate rhetoric as organizational discourse Rhetoric is the humanistic tradition for the study of persuasion. Identified most closely with the ancient Greeks and Romans, rhetoric's classical emphasis is best captured by Aristotle's famous definition ‘the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion’ (1954. p. 3). This means analysing the art of using symbols to persuade others to change their attitudes, beliefs, values or actions. In contrast to persuasion are processes through which auditors are coerced to act in particular ways through the use of inartistic strategies such as threats, torture or contracts. The ‘rhetorical situation’ envisioned by Aristotle and Cicero (1942) was comparatively simple by today's standards because it involved an educated, propertied, male speaker addressing a homogeneous audience about an issue of the day for which the speaker and the audience had a shared interest. Aristotle understood keenly how inductive and deductive structures enthymeme ...
Fear appeals, which are used widely in information security campaigns, have become common tools in moti-vating individual compliance with information security policies and procedures. However, empirical assess-ments of the effectiveness of fear appeals have yielded mixed results, leading IS security scholars and practitioners to question the validity of the conventional fear appeal framework and the manner in which fear appeal behavioral modeling theories, such as protection motivation theory (PMT), have been applied to the study of information security phenomena. We contend that the conventional fear appeal rhetorical framework is inadequate when used in the context of information security threat warnings and that its primary behavioral modeling theory, PMT, has been misspecified in the extant information security research. Based on these arguments, we propose an enhanced fear appeal rhetorical framework that leverages sanctioning rhetoric as a secondary vector of threats to the human asset, thereby adding the dimension of personal relevance, which is critically absent from previous fear appeal frameworks and PMT-grounded security studies. Following a hypothetical scenario research approach involving the employees of a Finnish city government, we validate the efficacy of the enhanced fear appeal framework and determine that informal sanction rhetoric effectively enhances conventional fear appeals, thus providing a significant positive influence on compliance intentions.
In this paper we propose rhetoric as a valuable yet underdeveloped alternative paradigm for examining IT diffusion. Building on recent developments of computerization movements theory, our rhetorical approach proposes that two central elements of the theory, framing and ideology, rather than being treated as separate can be usefully integrated. We suggest that IT diffusion can be usefully explored through examining the interrelationship of the deep structures underlying ideology and the type and sequence of rhetorical claims underpinning actors’ framing strategies. Our theoretical developments also allow us to better understand competing discourses influencing the diffusion process. These discourses reflect the ideologies and shape the framing strategies of actors in the broader field context. We illuminate our theoretical approach by drawing on the history of the diffusion of free and open source software.
The paper questions common assumptions in the dominant representational framings of information systems success and failure and proposes a performative perspective that conceives IS success and failure as relational effects performed by sociomaterial practices of IS project actor-networks of developers, managers, tech-nologies, project documents, methodologies, and other actors. Drawing from a controversial case of a highly innovative information system in an insurance company—considered a success and failure at the same time— the paper reveals the inherent indeterminacy of IS success and failure and describes the mechanisms by which success and failure become performed and thus determined by sociomaterial practices. This is explained by exposing ontological politics in the reconfiguration and decomposition of the IS project actor-network and the emergence of different agencies of assessment that performed both different IS realities and competing IS assessments. The analysis shows that the IS project and the implemented system as objects of assessment are not given and fixed, but are performed by the agencies of assessment together with the assessment outcomes of success and failure. The paper demonstrates that by reframing IS success and failure, the performative perspective provides some novel and surprising insights that have a potential to change conversations on IS assessments in both the IS literature and IS practice.
This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of cost escalation in transportation infrastructure projects. Based on a sample of 258 transportation infrastructure projects worth $90 billion (U.S.), it is found with overwhelming statistical significance that the cost estimates used to decide whether important infrastructure should be built are highly and systematically misleading. The result is continuous cost escalation of billions of dollars. The sample used in the study is the largest of its kind, allowing for the first time statistically valid conclusions regarding questions of cost underestimation and escalation for different project types, different geographical regions, and different historical periods. Four kinds of explanation of cost underestimation are examined: technical, economic, psychological, and political. Underestimation cannot be explained by error and is best explained by strategic misrepresentation, i.e., lying. The policy implications are clear: In debates and decision making on whether important transportation infrastructure should be built, those legislators, administrators, investors, media representatives, and members of the public who value honest numbers should not trust the cost estimates and cost-benefit analyses produced by project promoters and their analysts.
While the expanding body of attribute framing literature provides keen insights into individual judgments and evaluations, a lack of theoretical perspective inhibits scholars from more fully extending research foci beyond a relatively straightforward examination of message content. The current research applies construal level theory to attribute framing research. The authors conduct a meta-analysis of 107 published articles and then conceptually expand this knowledge base by synthesizing attribute framing research and construal level concepts. Results suggest that attribute framing is most effective when there is congruence between the construal level evoked in a frame and the evaluator’s psychological distance from the framed event. A follow-up experiment confirms that the congruence between a frame’s construal level and psychological distance—not simply its valence—appears to be driving attribute framing effects. This research proposes to shift the focus in attribute framing research from that of message composition to a more complex relationship between the message and the recipient.
This paper argues, first, that a major problem in the planning of large infrastructure projects is the high level of misinformation about costs and benefits that decision makers face in deciding whether to build, and the high risks such misinformation generates. Second, it explores the causes of misinformation and risk, mainly in the guise of optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Finally, the paper presents a number of measures aimed at improving planning and decision making for large infrastructure projects, including changed incentive structures and better planning methods. Thus the paper is organized as a simple triptych consisting in problems, causes, and cures.
Recent management research imports rhetorical scholarship into the study of organizations. Although this cross-disciplinarity is heuristically promising, it presents significant challenges. This article interrogates management's use of rhetoric, contrasting it with communication studies. Five themes from management research identify how rhetoric is used as an organizational hermeneutic: The article demonstrates that management research conceptualizes rhetoric as a theory and as an action; as the substance that maintains and/or challenges organizational order; as being constitutive of individual and organizational identity; as a managerial strategy for persuading followers; and as a framework for narrative and rational organizational discourses. The authors argue that organizational researchers who study rhetoric characterize persuasive strategies as managers' most important actions.
Current guidance for organizational spokespersons lacks a clear theoretical and empirical foundation. This article describes a study designed to rank preferences for five previously identified rhetorical strategies for responding to hostile questions in environmental public meetings based on speech act theory. Responses based on the timing strategy (i.e., claiming that the questioner's request already has been addressed) were most preferred, whereas those based on the agency strategy (i.e., claiming that some other agent is responsible) were least preferred. In addition, some responses based on the desirability strategy (i.e., providing reasons that the questioner actually does not want his or her request fulfilled) were as preferred as those based on the timing strategy.
This article considers data from a hospital that was introducing an experimental new facility onto an existing site, including the process of institutionalization of the argument ‘The new facility requires radically new working practices.’ The data are used to test a proposed integration of Barley and Tolbert’s (1997) model of the psychological mechanisms involved in institutionalization with a political model of how motives vary during the stages of organizational change. There is some empirical support for a congruence between the two models, namely, that psychological encoding matches with political recognition, psychological enactment matches with political transition, and psychological replication and externalization match with political consolidation.
I use rhetorical theory to reconceptualize the diffusion of managerial practices. Specifically, I argue that the diffusion of a practice depends on the discursive justifications used to rationalize it. When such justifications are accepted and taken for granted, a practice reaches a state of institutionalization. Furthermore, I propose that changes in justifications and diffusion provide a basis for explaining institutionalization as both a process and a state. I then develop several propositions from this model.
This paper explores how theories of the planning fallacy and the outside view may be used to conduct quality control and due diligence in project management. First, a much-neglected issue in project management is identified, namely that the front-end estimates of costs and benefits – used in the business cases, cost-benefit analyses, and social and environmental impact assessments that typically support decisions on projects – are typically significantly different from actual ex post costs and benefits, and are therefore poor predictors of the actual value and viability of projects. Second, it is discussed how Kahneman and Tversky’s theories of the planning fallacy and the outside view may help explain and remedy this situation through quality control of decisions. Third, it is described what quality control and due diligence are in the context of project management, and an eight-step procedure is outlined for due diligence based on the outside view. Fourth, the procedure is tested on a real-life, multibillion-dollar project, organized as a public-private partnership. Finally, Akerlof and Shiller’s recent discussion in economics of “firing the forecaster” is discussed together with its relevance to project management. In sum, the paper demonstrates the need, the theoretical basis, a practical methodology, and a real-life example for how to de-bias project management using quality control and due diligence based on the outside view.
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2229700
The American Planning Association recently endorsed a new forecasting method called reference class forecasting, which is based on theories of planning and decision-making that won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics. This paper details the method and describes the first instance of reference class forecasting in planning practice. First, the paper documents that inaccurate projections of costs, demand, and other impacts of plans are a major problem in planning. Second, the paper explains inaccuracy in terms of optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Third, the theoretical basis is presented for reference class forecasting, which achieves accuracy in projections by basing them on actual performance in a reference class of comparable actions and thereby bypassing both optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Fourth, the paper presents the first case of practical reference class forecasting, which concerns cost projections for planning of large transportation infrastructure investments in the UK, including the Edinburgh Tram and London’s £15 billion Crossrail project. Finally, potentials for and barriers to reference class forecasting are assessed.
This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of cost escalation in transportation infrastructure projects. Based on a sample of 258 transportation infrastructure projects worth US$90 billion and representing different project types, geographical regions, and historical periods, it is found with overwhelming statistical significance that the cost estimates used to decide whether such projects should be built are highly and systematically misleading. Underestimation cannot be explained by error and is best explained by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying. The policy implications are clear: legislators, administrators, investors, media representatives, and members of the public who value honest numbers should not trust cost estimates and cost-benefit analyses produced by project promoters and their analysts.
Levin, Schneider, and Gaeth (1998) identified three distinct types of framing effects in the literature: attribute framing effects, goal framing effects, risky choice framing effects. While most previous framing studies used between-subjects manipulations of frame, the present study used two sessions, spaced one week apart, to give each of 102 participants both framing conditions and all three types of framing. Using the difference between the score for the positive framing condition and the negative framing condition as the unit of analysis for each type of framing effect, the following were found: (1) reliable framing effects for attribute framing and risky choice framing, but not for goal framing; (2) distributions of individual framing effects showing that the aggregate-level effects were representative of individuals even though some individuals showed no framing effects; (3) no significant interdependencies between the three categories of framing effects; (4) individual differences in reaction to the task scenarios related to various of the “Big Five” personality traits as well as the Faith in Intuition scale. The use of within-subject designs to assess individual differences in decision-making phenomena such as framing effects and other biases and heuristics is recommended for future research.
This study explores how managers’ framing of project progress can reveal investment intentions. In three experiments managers were asked to evaluate hypothetical progress statements related to a failing project. Experiment 1 showed that past-oriented statements, describing the amount of work done and amount of budget and time spent (75%), were perceived as revealing a preference for the sunk costs option to a larger extent than future-oriented statements describing the magnitude of work, budget and time remaining (25%). In the next two experiments, progress was described relative to explicit reference points: in Experiment 2 more than 70%, or less than 80% was done/spent, while more than 20%, or less than 30% was remaining; in Experiment 3 almost half was done/spent, or almost half remaining. These different ways of framing progress in terms of work, money, and time were readily interpreted either as arguments in support of continued investments, or as arguments for switching to a novel project, dependent upon the perceived (rather than the numerical) magnitudes of achievements, investments, and remaining resources. The studies contribute to a communicative view of framing, and give an indication of managers’ implicit theories of the psychology of sunk costs.
Software projects can often spiral out of control to become "runaway systems" that far exceed original budget and schedule projections. The behavior that underlies many runaway systems can best be characterized as "escalation of commitment to a failing course of action." The objectives of this study were to: (1) understand the extent to which IS projects are prone to escalate, (2) compare the outcomes of projects that escalate with those that do not, and (3) test whether constructs associated with different theories of escalation can be used to discriminate between projects that escalate and those that do not. A survey was administered to IS audit and control professionals and, to establish a baseline for comparison, the survey was designed to gather data on projects that did not escalate as well as those that did escalate. The results of our research suggest that between 30% and 40% of all IS projects exhibit some degree of escalation. Projects that escalated had project outcomes that were significantly worse in terms of perceived implementation performance and perceived budget/schedule performance, as compared to projects that did not escalate. Using constructs from theories that have been used to explain the escalation phenomenon, we were able to test various logistic regression models for their ability to discriminate between projects that escalate and those that do not. To construct our models, we explored constructs derived from self-justification theory, prospect theory, agency theory, and approach avoidance theory. While constructs derived from all four theories were significant in logistic regression models, the completion effect construct derived from approach avoidance theory provided the best classification of projects, correctly classifying over 70% of both escalated and non-escalated projects.
The return that organisations derive from investments in information systems and technology continues to disappoint. While there is a very significant body of literature on the factors that should facilitate a successful outcome from systems development, there is growing concern that these prescriptions are not having their desired effect. In this paper, we argue that the success of a systems development project should be measured in terms of its ability to deliver meaningful benefits, rather than the timely delivery of a technical artefact, and therefore organisations should adopt an explicit and proactive benefits realisation approach when investing in IT. Consequently, we sought to explore those actionable factors that might facilitate the effective realisation of benefits from systems development initiatives. Three organisations were identified that claimed to adopt a proactive approach to benefits realisation, and detailed studies of their systems development practices were conducted. Our analysis found that whilst one organisation had been successful in its adoption of a benefits realisation perspective, the other two had not, and this allowed us to identify those factors that helped to explain this difference in outcomes. In short, this paper makes an important contribution by identifying how a sub-set of traditional systems success factors might be enhanced, to give them a more explicit benefits realisation orientation. Moreover, it presents a coherent set of principles that can be used for deriving other factors and practices.
Reliability is an important bottleneck for content analysis and similar methods for generating analyzable data. This is because the analysis of complex qualitative phenomena such as texts, social interactions, and media images easily escape physical measurement and call for human coders to describe what they read or observe. Owing to the individuality of coders, the data they generate for subsequent analysis are prone to errors not typically found in mechanical measuring devices. However, most measures that are designed to indicate whether data are sufficiently reliable to warrant analysis do not differentiate among kinds of disagreement that prevent data from being reliable. This paper distinguishes two kinds of disagreement, systematic disagreement and random disagreement, and suggests measures of them in conjunction with the agreement coefficient α (alpha) (Krippendorff, 2004a, pp. 211-256). These measures, previously proposed for interval data (Krippendorff, 1970), are here developed for nominal data. Their importance lies in their ability to not only aid the development of reliable coding instructions but also warn researchers about two kinds of errors they face when using imperfect data.
This paper investigates the tightness of budgetary control over projects in a large systems development multinational. This represents a case of extreme ISD failure en mass, where all but 2 of the 22 projects in a business unit went over budget, causing senior executives to refocus their strategic priorities and cancel all current and potential projects that followed. This study focuses specifically on the two best performing (12% and 4% under- budget) and worst performing (223% and 320% over budget) of these projects. Using a framework drawn from control systems theory, this study examines the 'tightness' of budgetary control that was exerted over each project, and what was done or could have been done to avert such failure. The study then identifies a set of emerging factors affecting tight budgetary control in ISD. BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY Given that there has been little research on budgetary control in ISD projects, and none specifically on the tightness of these controls, we sought in this study to identify the factors affecting tight budgetary control in ISD projects. Our research objective is thus to investigate and identify the factors affecting tight budgetary control in ISD projects. The next sections of the paper summarises the pertinent literature and describes the theoretical basis and research approach adopted in this study. The findings from four 'revelatory' case studies is then presented, showing that budgetary control of all four projects was very loose. These findings are then discussed and through further analysis, a theoretical model of the factors affecting tight budgetary control is then presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the study and possible avenues for future research.
This paper focuses on problems and their causes and cures in policy and planning for large-infrastructure projects. First, it identifies as the main problem in major infrastructure developments pervasive misinformation about the costs, benefits, and risks involved. A consequence of misinformation is cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and waste. Second, it explores the causes of misinformation and finds that political-economic explanations best account for the available evidence: planners and promoters deliberately misrepresent costs, benefits, and risks in order to increase the likelihood that it is their projects, and not those of their competition, that gain approval and funding. This results in the ‘survival of the unfittest’, in which often it is not the best projects that are built, but the most misrepresented ones. Finally, it presents measures for reforming policy and planning for large-infrastructure projects with a focus on better planning methods and changed governance structures, the latter being more important.
There is a trend of combining agile and traditional project management practices for technology-based product and service development in the search for more agility. Although there are, in the literature, hybrid models that propose combinations of traditional and agile approaches, there are no studies that discuss the impact of the adoption of this approach in organizations in practice. Consequently, guidance on the selection of the most appropriate project management approach has remained largely theoretical, rather than based on companies' experiences. The objective of this research is to analyze how organizations that develop technology-based products and services apply hybrid approaches to project management, their characteristics, advantages , and disadvantages, conducting a literature review and multiple case studies as research methods. Results reveal that hybrid approaches to project management are currently fundamental for companies in order to deal with distinct organizational cultures , specific processes, customer contractual requirements, and project specificities. This study also led to a consolidated list of the characteristics of hybrid approaches to project management.
People frame their communications to suit their personal agendas, even when they are collaborating. However, most information systems (IS) literature assumes people working together have completely aligned agendas. The assumption of agenda alignment in prior research motivates our examination of how agendas and media capabilities influence communication performance. By relaxing the assumption of complete agenda alignment, we reconceptualize how media capabilities interact with communication processes to influence communication performance. We empirically test our model using a lab study with 712 participants interacting face-to-face or via virtual worlds on tasks with differing degrees of agenda alignment. We used a hierarchical linear modeling approach to test our hypotheses. Our results support the role of media synchronicity for explaining communication performance when agendas are aligned. However, our study shows that relaxing the assumption of agenda alignment changes communication in profound ways. We find that media synchronicity is insufficient for describing how media capabilities influence performance in partially cooperative communication contexts. Our findings reveal the importance of anonymity and communication framing when communicants’ agendas differ.
Combining insights from public administration, accounting, and psychology, this article explores the microprocesses by which public managers use performance information, investigating whether the type of performance information use and the request to justify decisions affect the way in which information is processed. The study draws on data from a series of artifactual survey experiments with Italian municipal executives. Findings show that managers process information differently under ex post rather than ex ante performance information uses. More specifically, managers are more likely to be subject to framing bias under ex post than under ex ante uses of performance information. This interaction seems to be robust when subjects are asked to provide justification for their decisions.
Prior research suggests that information technology (IT) project escalation can result from the deaf effect, a phenomenon in which decision makers fail to heed risk warnings communicated by others. Drawing inspiration from stewardship theory, we posited that when messengers carrying risk warnings about a project are seen as collaborative partners, decision makers are more likely to heed the message. Conversely, we theorized that when messengers are seen as opponents, decision makers are more likely to exhibit the deaf effect. We further posited that certain psychological factors (i.e., framing and perceived control) would moderate the effect of the messenger-recipient relationship on the deaf effect. To test these ideas, we conducted two experiments. When messengers were seen as collaborative partners, recipients assigned more relevance to the risk warning and perceived a higher risk, making them less willing to continue the project. Framing the outcomes associated with redirecting or continuing the project in terms of losses (rather than gains) weakened this effect. However, when recipients perceived a high degree of control over the project the effect was strengthened. Implications for both research and practice are discussed.
Numerous studies over the years have shown that information systems development (ISD) projects often run over budget or fail entirely. Such failures are not restricted to certain industry sectors or project types; rather they occur with some regularity in systems development projects and organisations of all types and sizes. Cost estimation has long been a difficult task in systems development, and although much research has focused on traditional methods, little is known about estimation in the agile method arena. This is somewhat ironic given that the reduction of cost and development time is the driving force behind the emergence of agile methods. This study looks at how classical problems which adversely affect cost estimation in traditional ISD are managed within the agile paradigm. A qualitative approach was followed, based on data collected from four companies. Amongst other findings, the study revealed that estimation inaccuracy was a less frequent occurrence for these companies. A number of recommendations can be drawn from the research: estimation models are not a necessary component of the process; fixed-price budgets can prove beneficial for both developers and customers; and experience and past project data should be documented and used to aid future estimation efforts.
Many IT projects continue to suffer from poor estimation. Indeed, the accuracy of estimation has hardly changed from that reported in a seminal study carried out over 20 years ago. Based on findings from two recent survey-based studies, which replicated and then extended the original study, we provide guidelines for improving IT project estimation, taking account of the greater use today of Agile, rather than traditional Waterfall, development methods.
Prior research suggests that information technology (IT) project escalation can result from the deaf effect, a phenomenon in which decision makers fail to heed risk warnings communicated by others. Drawing inspiration from stewardship theory, we posited that when messengers carrying risk warnings about a project are seen as collaborative partners, decision makers are more likely to heed the message. Conversely, we theorized that when messengers are seen as opponents, decision makers are more likely to exhibit the deaf effect. We further posited that certain psychological factors (i.e., framing and perceived control) would moderate the effect of the messenger-recipient relationship on the deaf effect. To test these ideas, we conducted two experiments. When messengers were seen as collaborative partners, recipients assigned more relevance to the risk warning and perceived a higher risk, making them less willing to continue the project. Framing the outcomes associated with redirecting or continuing the project in terms of losses (rather than gains) weakened this effect. However, when recipients perceived a high degree of control over the project the effect was strengthened. Implications for both research and practice are discussed.
Deconstruction, a post-structuralist approach to examining language in texts, is most often associated with the philosophical works of Jacque Derrida. After a flurry of interest among management and information systems (IS) scholars, this qualitative approach to exploring organizational texts has received little attention in the IS literature. We suggest deconstruction could help our field explore how IS texts describe the social and technical past and also prescribe and circumscribe the future of IS practice. Thus, we suggest the IS field reconsider how deconstruction might contribute to language-based approaches in IS research and practice. In this paper, we discuss deconstruction in light of the linguistic turn in social science research and the support and criticism for its use in management research. We consider IS research publications that have employed deconstruction explicitly, examine a well-known IS publication as an example of the deconstruction of IS texts, and suggest ways in which deconstruction might be applied to various genres of IS texts to inspire insights and creativity. To conclude, we highlight considerations for researchers who might adopt this approach and for the editors and reviewers who would evaluate qualitative research papers that employ deconstruction.
This paper evaluates the impact of two approaches to knowledge management in projects — one focused on aligning project documents (“the Plan-based approach”) and another focused on developing shared understanding between different teams within a project (“the People-based approach”). A theoretical model and hypotheses are proposed and explored using data from a survey of 212 IT-enabled business projects. Results indicate that the people-based approach is more strongly influential on a project's success in securing business benefits. Although the plan-based approach is less influential, it does positively influence business benefit attainment and also supports the people-based approach. Thus, attaining shared understanding within the project team and aligning key documents are both important goals for a project's knowledge management strategy.
While intranets have become a central information hub for employees in different parts of an organization, they have also played a key role as a rhetorical tool for senior managers. With the advent of social media, this is increasingly so. How such technologies as these are incorporated into organizations’ ‘rhetorical practices’ is an important, yet under-researched topic. To explore this research agenda, we examine the effects of social media on established and emerging flows of rhetorical practices in organizations, focusing in particular on the expanding, and in some cases switching, roles played by senior management and employees. We conceptualize organizational rhetorical practices as the combination of strategic intent, message and media, and discuss the interplay between rhetors and their audience. Adopting an interpretive, multiple case study approach, we study the use of social media in three multi-national organizations in the telecommunications industry. Our findings reveal that social media enable and facilitate the shaping of organizational rhetorical practices by (i) adding multivocality; (ii) increasing reach and richness in communication, and (iii) enabling simultaneous consumption and co-production of rhetorical content.
The planning fallacy refers to a prediction phenomenon, all too familiar to many, wherein people underestimate the time it will take to complete a future task, despite knowledge that previous tasks have generally taken longer than planned. In this chapter, we review theory and research on the planning fallacy, with an emphasis on a programmatic series of investigations that we have conducted on this topic. We first outline a definition of the planning fallacy, explicate controversies and complexities surrounding its definition, and summarize empirical research documenting the scope and generality of the phenomenon. We then explore the origins of the planning fallacy, beginning with the classic inside–outside cognitive model developed by Kahneman and Tversky [Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Intuitive prediction: biases and corrective procedures. TIMS Studies in Management Science, 12, 313–327]. Finally, we develop an extended inside–outside model that integrates empirical research examining cognitive, motivational, social, and behavioral processes underlying the planning fallacy.
This paper describes the role of rhetoric in legitimating profound institutional change. In 1997, a Big Five accounting firm purchased a law firm, triggering a jurisdictional struggle within accounting and law over a new organizational form, multidisciplinary partnerships. We analyze the discursive struggle that ensued between proponents and opponents of the new organizational form. We observe that such rhetorical strategies contain two elements. First are institutional vocabularies, or the use of identifying words and referential texts to expose contradictory institutional logics embedded in historical understandings of professionalism, one based on a trustee model and the other based on a model of expertise. A second element of rhetorical strategies is theorizations of change by which actors contest a proposed innovation against broad templates or scenarios of change. We identify five such theorizations of change (teleological, historical, cosmological, ontological, and value-based) and describe their characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Administrative Science Quarterly is the property of Administrative Science Quarterly and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
The consistently successful delivery of projects remains an ambition that many organisations do not achieve. Whilst the reasons behind project failure are many, one recognised factor is the ‘planning fallacy’ – over-optimism in the planning phase of a project. Whilst the planning phase of a project may be a battle for acceptance and resource allocation, the execution phase is a battle for delivery. Based on both qualitative and quantitative data gathered from a project management simulation, this study set out to establish whether optimism bias persists beyond the planning phase and into the execution phase, and, if so, to explore the reasons why. The results confirm the extent and impact of optimism bias in initial project planning. More importantly, the contribution of this study is to demonstrate on-going or sustained false optimism.Research highlights► Optimism in projects has been the subject of academics and practitioners alike. ► This paper provides a study into the Sustainment of Optimism in a quasi-experiment. ► It provides a classification but also reasons for the sustainment of optimism. ► An understanding into sustained optimism helps to develop interventions.
Inadequate system requirements specifications reflect ineffective communication transactions between system users and developers. Today, effective communication between developers and users is more important than ever as organizations redirect resources to the development of decision/expert and communication support systems and to helping users develop their own systems. This paper reports on an exploratory study which tested the use of the Precision Model, a generalized communication model that draws upon a set of communication behaviors to facilitate effective communication between users and developers. These behaviors were incorporated into a general format for running design team meetings. The findings indicate that the new meeting format improved the communication between users and developers and enhanced their ability to develop shared, accurate and complete system requirements. In addition, the use of this format led to a reduction in the number of and length of meetings. It also demonstrated that developers were better able to develop and maintain rapport with users and that team members felt more productive and satisfied when meetings concluded. This research identifies specific behaviors and guidelines that can be used to improve the requirements definition process in any systems development project.
The present paper examines how framing of messages and the intentions inferred from different—positive vs. negative—framings, interact with the development of trust. Empirical evidence is presented showing that different, logically equivalent, frames are supposedly interpreted as implying different intentions. Next, the relationship between different frames (and the corresponding intentions reflected from these frames) and trust are explored. Finally, and most important, the relationship between the assessment of trust, inferred from different frames, and the corresponding choice behavior resulting from these frames, are investigated. Specifically, consider agents A and B offering to sell exactly the same commodity, except that one agent formulates it in a positive and the other in a negative frame. The different frames may lead to different assessments of the trustworthiness of the two agents. Following common wisdom, if agent A is trusted more than B, then one should prefer to conduct transactions with the former rather than with the latter agent. Several experiments are presented that are incompatible with this conjecture. For example, when faced with a choice between two butchers, whose ground beef is advertised as containing 25% fat (negative frame) or 75% lean (positive frame), respectively, most people have more trust in the former yet most indicate they would buy their meat from the latter butcher. This phenomenon, in which negative framing weighs more in trust assessments, and positive framing weighs more in choice, is labeled trust–choice incompatibility. The robustness of the phenomenon is further demonstrated in several experiments, and possible explanations for its occurrence are discussed.
This paper describes an empirical study of effort estimation in agile software development. Estimated effort and actual effort of a 46-iteration project are collected and analyzed. The results show that estimation in agile development is more accurate than that in traditional development even though agile developers still underestimate the effort. However, estimation accuracy is not improved over time as expected by agile communities.
An intranet increases in sophistication and complexity as it evolves. This evolution leads to an increasing need for control over the intranet. However, this is a contentious issue, as an intranet is deemed to be an empowering technology. Consequently, intranet control systems must balance empowerment and control so as not to negate each other. This paper investigates intranet control activities and their effect on users' perceptions of empowerment throughout the evolution of an intranet in Hewlett Packard (Ireland). The growth of the intranet is charted as a six-stage model that illustrates an evolution of purpose, control and empower- ment. The control strategies for managing the intranet implemented at each stage are investigated, and their resultant effects on empowerment are evaluated. The study reveals the importance of balancing control strategies with empowerment initiatives in managing intranet environments. Based on the evidence available, the study recommends the implementation of specific controls at particular stages in the evolution of an intranet in order to achieve control systems that balance empowerment and control.
The linguistic conceptual distinction between deep and surface structures offers an interesting metaphor for developing new theories of information systems. However, the deep structure notion is both richer and more strongly contested in the linguistic field than can be communicated in published articles about new theories of information systems. This article explores the deep structure notion more fully, how faithful information system (IS)-related articles adhere to the original concept and the implication of alternative linguistic theories for the IS field.
Framing effects are considered in a conversational framework using the well-known Asian Disease problem [Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211, 453-458]. Speakers' preferred message framing is examined and its corresponding persuasiveness is assessed using listeners' responses. The results show that speakers exhibit a marked and consistent preference for positive over negative framing (Experiment 1). Judged from listeners' responses, this preference is effective for promoting riskless, but not risky options. The incompatibility between speakers and listeners may be resolved by noting that speakers can jointly (i.e., comparatively) assess the information and the persuasive qualities of alternative frames. In contrast, listeners are exposed only to one of these frames and, consequently, can only assess the information separately (i.e., non-comparatively). Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrate that no incompatibility exists when both speakers and listeners are either in separate, or in joint evaluation mode. Differences between risky choice and attribute framing [Levin, I.P., Schneider, S.L., & Gaeth, G.J. (1998). All frames are not created equal: a typology and critical analysis of framing effects. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 76, 149-188] are briefly discussed.
This paper presents a general statistical methodology for the analysis of multivariate categorical data arising from observer reliability studies. The procedure essentially involves the construction of functions of the observed proportions which are directed at the extent to which the observers agree among themselves and the construction of test statistics for hypotheses involving these functions. Tests for interobserver bias are presented in terms of first-order marginal homogeneity and measures of interobserver agreement are developed as generalized kappa-type statistics. These procedures are illustrated with a clinical diagnosis example from the epidemiological literature.
The psychological principles that govern the perception of decision problems and the evaluation of probabilities and outcomes
produce predictable shifts of preference when the same problem is framed in different ways. Reversals of preference are demonstrated
in choices regarding monetary outcomes, both hypothetical and real, and in questions pertaining to the loss of human lives.
The effects of frames on preferences are compared to the effects of perspectives on perceptual appearance. The dependence
of preferences on the formulation of decision problems is a significant concern for the theory of rational choice.