An experiment on the introduction of software project management techniques to industry

The title of this thesis is "An experiment on the introductlon of software project management techniques to industry". The objecuve of the experiment is to test the hypothesis that the incidence of project management failure within organisations can be reduced by modifying both the approach to project management training and the method employed to manage projects. At the start of this experunent, a survey of project management practice within Irish industry was carried out. A benefiual outcome from this survey was the recruitment of a test organisation to participate in the expmnent. The experiment was conducted by executcng 8 stages of a test process The results from the expement were as follows: Key Finding 1 - Project management maturity within indiginous compames appears to be low - it would be worthwhle investigating this further to establish if such project management immaturity is typical for Irish industry. Key Finding 2 - Before a software enginering experient is run in a live environment we should first investigate if there are broader orgamsational issues (perhaps not directly related to the experiment) whch may affect the execution and ultimately the results of the experiment. Key Finding 3 - Experiment results suggest that the test training approach and project management methodology had a positive impact on the test project environment. It would be worthwhile to re-run the experiment on a larger sample size of projects to establish if these results can consistently be obtained across a larger sample group Key Finding 4 - The lessons to be learned with respect to software engineering experiments in general are as follows Some experiments can only be properly conducted in a live environment - this can present some difficulties to the person executing the experiment However, we should vlew any challenges presented as opportunities to collect potentially valuable data about the test environment; data that mght be used in future experiments or indeed to add value to the result of the experiment itself. And finally - Factors outside of the experiment made it dificult to properly evaluate the effects of the test training approach and methodology - consequently I would consider the experiment to have only been a partial success The results however, suggest that it may be beneficial to the project management industry to conduct further work in this area. This may be something to consider for a future date