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De-escalating IT projects: the DMM model
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Communications of the ACM archive
Volume 52 ,  Issue 10  (October 2009) table of contents
A View of Parallel Computing
SECTION: Virtual extension table of contents
Pages 131-134  
Year of Publication: 2009
ISSN:0001-0782
Authors
Donal Flynn  Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, UK
Gary Pan  School of Accountancy, Singapore Management University, Singapore
Mark Keil  J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA
Magnus Mähring  Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden and Ecole de Management Stratsbourg, Stratsbourg, France
Publisher
ACM  New York, NY, USA
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ABSTRACT

Introduction

Taming runaway Information Technology (IT) projects is a challenge that most organizations have faced and that managers continue to wrestle with. These are projects that grossly exceed their planned budgets and schedules, often by a factor of 2--3 fold or greater. Many end in failure; failure not only in the sense of budget or schedule, but in terms of delivered functionality as well.

Runaway projects are frequently the result of escalating commitment to a failing course of action, a phenomenon that occurs when investments fail to work out as envisioned and decision-makers compound the problem by persisting irrationally. Keil, Mann, and Rai reported that 30--40% of IT projects exhibit some degree of escalation. To break the escalation cycle, de-escalation of commitment to the failing course of action must occur so that valuable resources can be channeled into more productive use. But, making de-escalation happen is neither easy nor intuitive.

This article briefly examines three approaches that have been suggested for managing de-escalation. By combining elements from the three approaches, we introduce a de-escalation management maturity (DMM) model that provides a useful framework for improving practice.


REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

 
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