Investigating project performance measurements based on the complexity level of IT-enabled projects

The success of Information Technology (IT) implementation projects and in particular IT-enabled projects has long been a concern for the project management fraternity. This paper reviews literature in order to describe the need to measure the performance of IT-enabled projects based on the complexity level of IT-enabled projects. These IT-enabled projects deliver organisational changes and they are impacted by socio-cultural, organisational, process and technology challenges while implementing IT systems. Complexity comes in several forms and it leads to risks within the project environment. Project management often places a lot of emphasis on ensuring that a project delivers its deliverables according to a defined performance measure but it is less focused on ensuring that the correct performance measures are in place. Project managers are blamed for failures that are caused by environmental factors. In fact, IT projects are often abandoned due to human related, political and organisational issues. This paper presents the proposal for investigating how project performance can be measured based on the complexity level of IT-enabled project. It presents the research problem which highlights the fact that project management can be viewed as scientific in terms of how success is measured. It also points out that project managers are blamed for project failures that they have little or no control over as these failures may have occurred due to environmental factors. It presents literature on the various measurements of success and the types of complexities that exist within a project environment. It concludes that project managers need a better understanding of complex projects and their adaptive environment to effectively manage projects. The aim being to improve project management practice by measuring project performance based on the complexity level of the IT-enabled project.