[AISWorld] CFP AMCIS 2012 Minitrack - General Topics in IT Project Management

[Stacie C Petter]

CALL FOR PAPERS

18th Americas Conference on Information Systems Seattle, Washington, 
August 9-12, 2012

Track: IT Project Management
Mini-track: General Topics in IT Project Management

DESCRIPTION

Project-based work structures have become the norm within a number of 
industries, including the Information Technology (IT) sector, and these 
structures present new challenges for managers and researchers. For 
project managers in the wider arena, particularly in construction and 
engineering, such project-based work structures still operate within a 
clear overall management structure, with project teams that are likely to 
remain the same from project to project, working on projects that are 
relatively well-defined and with a high degree of repeatability. In 
contrast, the IT sector is characterized by rapidly changing technology 
and contexts of application. Project managers typically face new, diverse, 
and ill-defined requirements for each project, and must manage their 
projects in rapidly changing conditions and under high time pressure. In 
addition, IT project managers usually work within a poorly defined 
management structure. Therefore, they must gain the support and 
commitment, without direct position power, of a loosely aggregated set of 
team members who often change from project to project, and even from stage 
to stage within a project. Increasingly in IT projects, team members are 
also geographically distributed, presenting yet another set of challenges 
for their project managers. As a result, while the project management 
profession has seen considerable performance improvements in the last 
fifty years, IT projects have been reported as having a track record of 
poor performance. This has occurred even though proven best practices from 
the wider sector have been applied in the IT arena. 

For researchers, the varied and changing contexts and the diversity of IT 
projects present a number of challenges, particularly with more 
traditional quantitative methods, since it is difficult to find sufficient 
similarity across IT projects to enable unambiguous cross-project 
comparisons. Thus, historically, IT project management has been an 
under-researched area with limited theoretical development, relying 
instead on normative articles prescribing best practice for the 
profession, with relatively little empirical testing of these 
prescriptions. In particular, we have little understanding of issues 
relating to the project context, relationships between project management 
and organization management, the organization as client, and external and 
internal stakeholders. Nor do we know much about when and why the best 
practices prescribed in the research literature and well established in 
the broader project management profession do and do not work within IT 
project management. As a research community, there is still much to be 
learned and discussed about improving success rates for IT projects. 
SUGGESTED TOPICS 
General Topics in IT Project Management features work that focuses on 
research across many traditional IS/IT project management areas, 
including, but not limited to virtual project management, learning from 
projects, project management methodologies, distributed project 
management, project leadership, project quality metrics, project 
management standards, best practices in project management, project 
success, alignment of IT strategy and business strategy through project 
selection, boundary spanning issues for project managers, managing 
multiple projects, the project management office. 

IMPORTANT DATES

January 2, 2012 - Manuscript Central will start accepting paper 
submissions 
March 1, 2012 (11:59 PM Pacific time zone) - Deadline for paper 
submissions 
April 6, 2012 - Authors will be notified of acceptances on or about this 
date 
April 25, 2012 (11:59 PM Pacific time zone) - For accepted papers, 
camera-ready copy due

SUBMISSION SITE

http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/amcis2012

CO-CHAIRS

Dr. Stacie Petter
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Email: spetter at mail.unomaha.edu

Dr. Hazel Taylor
University of Washington
E-mail: htaylor at uw.edu 
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