The Most Critical Success Factors in Software Projects

Abstract

Project performance measures are undertaken in an organization to provide information to managers in order to exert control over the project. Those measures must be appropriate to the organizational level that can immediately effect change based on information it learns in order to control the performance of the project at hand. Decisions are an everyday occurrence in projects; driving the processes to make good decisions falls largely on project management. However, different types of projects have different levels throughout out its life time. Furthermore, in some cases controlling the project through the traditional iron triangle components (cost / budget, time and quality) also seems inefficient. So this research is focused on developing a project performance evaluation framework for software industry in Sri- Lanka in order to support the managers to monitor the project, classify the project success factors and identify the areas where improvements can be made. And also this model will help to study about the cross project learning. An approach based on factor component Analysis (DEA) is used to develop the project performance evaluation system which allows managers to explicitly consider differences in input variables across projects when evaluating the project output.