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Benefit Considerations in Project Decisions

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Book cover Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13709))

Abstract

Software project success is often characterized in terms of time, cost and scope – despite that delivering benefit is the main purpose of a project. In this paper, we explore 1) to what degree benefit considerations influence major project decisions, 2) to what degree a specific set of benefits management challenge are handled and influence major project decisions and 3) if there is any realization (over time) that benefit considerations should receive greater attention. We investigate influence in projects with four types of problem severity: completed projects with only minor problems, completed projects with major problems, projects that were disrupted but completed, and projects that were terminated before completion. We asked 45 software professionals to what degree time, cost, scope, benefit and benefit/cost, as well as benefits management challenges, influence major project decisions. Our findings indicate that time, cost and scope have a significantly higher degree of influence on project decisions than benefit and benefit/cost. However, practitioners think that benefit and benefit/cost should have significantly more influence on decisions than cost. The benefits management challenges are found to have less influence in the more severe projects. We argue that giving benefits considerations a stronger voice in project decisions would be in line with the desire of practitioners and the prime objective of delivering benefit to stakeholders. We conclude that it is important to understand how to handle benefits management challenges at different stages of project life and that handling such challenges should be integrated with other prime drivers of project success.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Data analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics version 27 using test-wise deletion of missing data.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to experienced IT professionals Kjetil Strand, Hans Christian Benestad and Bjørn Olav Salvesen for feedback on the questionnaire. The authors are further grateful to the survey respondents.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering, Oslo, Norway

    Sinan Sigurd Tanilkan & Jo Erskine Hannay

Authors
  1. Sinan Sigurd Tanilkan
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  2. Jo Erskine Hannay
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Correspondence to Sinan Sigurd Tanilkan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Davide Taibi

  2. Reutlingen University, Reutlingen, Germany

    Marco Kuhrmann

  3. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Tommi Mikkonen

  4. Leibniz University Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Jil Klünder

  5. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Pekka Abrahamsson

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Tanilkan, S.S., Hannay, J.E. (2022). Benefit Considerations in Project Decisions. In: Taibi, D., Kuhrmann, M., Mikkonen, T., Klünder, J., Abrahamsson, P. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13709. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21388-5_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21388-5_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-21387-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-21388-5

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