Information Systems Development Project Success: The Use of Incentives and Rewards for Developers

The failure rate of information systems (IS) development projects remains alarmingly high. Many factors have been identified as its cause. One such cause is a lack of incentives or rewards for developers. A survey instrument was developed using content analysis of structured interviews of twelve IS project managers. Responses to a Web-based survey came from 409 members of a professional organization of IS project managers. The instrument was statistically tested for internal reliability and convergent and discriminant validity. Regression analysis tested the relationship of incentives and rewards to project success. This study contributes to the understanding of information systems project management by showing that an incentives and rewards construct is bi-dimensional. One dimension, professionalism, strongly predicted project success in terms of client satisfaction, perceived quality, and implementation process, whereas the other, perquisites, predicted it weakly and only in terms of implementation process. These findings might help IS project managers offer more appropriate incentives and rewards.

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