A Road Less Travelled: Exploratory Practice-Driven Theory Development Opportunities in IS Project Management

This paper reports on a high potential and under-utilised approach to developing theory to improve IS project performance, a significant and persistent problem for the IS discipline. It presents a multi-disciplinary approach to exploratory research, which is oriented towards solving problems in practice by developing new theory or adapting extant theory to a new milieu. This research approach is based on ‘looking for a gap in practice and finding the theory in the gap’. It presents examples from a program of research that has provided a number of theories to improve IS project management performance. It shows that the IS field may require multiple theories to support the management of projects rather than a single theory of project management.

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