THE EFFECTS OF USER INVOLVEMENT, USER
PARTICIPATION, AND TASK COMPLEXITY ON
INFORMATION SYSTEM PROJECT SUCCESS
Proposal for a Master Thesis
of
MICHAEL BURGMAIER
Proposed starting date: 07.01.2016
Matriculation number: 1458237
Chair of Information Systems IV
Enterprise Systems
University of Mannheim
Reviewer: Prof. Dr. Alexander Mädche
Supervisor: Phillip Haake
Table of Contents
1
Motivation ......................................................................................................................... 1
1.1 Objectives of Thesis ................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Structure of the Thesis ................................................................................................ 3
2
Theoretical Foundation .................................................................................................... 3
3
Related Work .................................................................................................................... 4
4
Methods ............................................................................................................................. 4
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. ix
ii
1 Motivation
As people are nowadays surrounded by easy-to-use software with high usability in
their private life, they begin to expect a comparable usability from Enterprise Systems
they work with at their workplace (Woywode et al., 2012). Therefore, one solution to
meet the requirements of the users is to integrate them into the development or
implementation project of the Enterprise System (Bano & Zowghi, 2015).
Consequently, user involvement is a very important factor for the management of
projects (The Standish Group International, 2013).
Regarding current research, there is a lack of knowledge about the different forms of
user involvement (informative, consultative, and participative) that are required to make
an implementation project successful (Bano & Zowghi, 2015). Also it is not clarified
how the degree and types of user involvement and participation affect the outcome of
projects (Venkatesh, 2008). Moreover, most prior studies considering Enterprise System
implementation projects focused on the individual. Therefore, there is a need to analyze
the effects of user involvement using a more holistic perspective by focusing on the
project as unit of analysis.
In order to contribute to the research, the proposed master thesis aims to analyze
how different types and degrees of user involvement and participation influence the
success of information system projects. Project success includes the two components
project management success (measured against time, cost, and quality) and product
success (Jetu & Riedl, 2012). To measure the product success, different success
dimensions like usability, user experience, user satisfaction, and effective use shall be
considered. Moreover, the proposed thesis aims to analyze how different configurations
of task complexity and user involvement and participation influence the project success.
1.1 Objectives of Thesis
The proposed thesis will build on and extend the master thesis of Marco Baumer
(2015) that covered the same subject area. The following preliminary research questions
shall be answered:
-
How and why do different types and degrees of user involvement and
participation during different project phases influence the usability, user
experience, user satisfaction, and effective use of the implemented Enterprise
System?
1
-
How and why are different configurations of task complexity and user
involvement and participation during different project phases influencing the
usability, user experience, user satisfaction, and effective use of the
implemented Enterprise System?
Consequently, the thesis of Marco Baumer will be extended by the aspect of task
complexity that is expected to influence the relationship between user involvement and
participation and project success. This leads to the advanced research framework shown
in figure 1. In order to answer the research questions a case study including more cases
shall be used to analyze the effects. Therefore, it is aimed to analyze five to ten
information system projects of organizations. In order to harmonize the context and to
increase the comparability of individual projects, thereby the focus will be set on
Enterprise System implementation projects (ideally of standard software) instead of
development projects.
Figure 1: Research Framework (based on Baumer (2015) and Bano & Zowghi (2015))
In order to analyze the different projects, the configurational approach shall be
used. In this approach an organization is seen as a cluster of dimensions that jointly
determine the outcome (Fiss, 2007). An organizational configuration is considered to be
“any multidimensional constellation of conceptually distinct characteristics that
commonly occur together” (Meyer, Tsui, & Hinings, 1993, p. 1175). As this definition
includes multiple instances of constellations across entities or time, it cannot only be
used for the analysis of organizations, but also for the analysis of user involvement in
enterprise system projects. That means that in the proposed thesis a project is seen as a
set of conditions, which together determine the project success.
2
1.2 Structure of the Thesis
After introducing into the topic the proposed thesis will present the theoretical
background that is relevant in order to answer the research questions. Especially the
foundations regarding user involvement and participation, project management, project
success, and the influencing effect of task complexity will be discussed. Considering
project success different theoretical models like the Task-Technology Fit theory
(Goodhue & Thompson, 1995), the Information Systems Success Model (Delone &
McLean, 2003), and the Coping Model of User Adaptation (Beaudry & Pinsonneault,
2005) will be presented. Moreover, the already mentioned success dimensions usability,
user experience, user satisfaction, and effective use will be introduced. Next to
explaining the theoretical foundations, propositions about the relationship of different
forms of user involvement and user participation with the overall project success will be
developed based on existing research.
This part is followed by the research methodology where the design of the case
study including information about the data collection, the coding approach, and the data
analysis will be explained. Furthermore, the used methods will be pointed out. Next, in
the findings all the cases will be first described and then analyzed, using a single-case
analysis and a cross-case analysis. In the next chapter the findings will be discussed and
theoretical as well as practical contributions will be shown. Moreover, the limitations of
the thesis will be explained. The thesis will be finally closed by a conclusion.
2 Theoretical Foundation
In the past the terms user participation and user involvement have been used
synonymously by researchers (Harris & Weistroffer, 2009). In contrast to that Abelein,
Sharp, and Paech (2013) defined user participation as an aspect of the development
process while user involvement is defined as the human aspect. This distinguishing
definition of the two terms shall be used in the proposed thesis. Furthermore, the three
kinds of user involvement suggested by Damodaran (1996), informative, consultative,
and participative user involvement will be differentiated and differences between the
three kinds of involvement will be pointed out.
Regarding the information system project success, in literature it is not uniformly
agreed how to measure the success (Bano & Zowghi, 2015). However, as already
mentioned above, different authors like Jetu & Riedl (2012) divide success into project
3
management success and product success. While project management success can be
measured using the three attributes time, cost, and quality, product success can be
measured using a variety of variables. The proposed study will focus on the usercentered dependent variables usability, user experience, user satisfaction, and effective
use.
3 Related Work
The topic of user involvement has long been an important part of Information
System research in the past and has been revived in the recent past (Markus & Mao,
2004). Current approaches focus on the separate phases of the software implementation
process, which is often divided into the three phases: pre-adoption, adoption, and postadoption (Damanpour & Schneider, 2006). For each of the phases there are several
studies delivering a variety of perspectives (e.g. focusing user resistance, Information
Systems avoidance, or effective use). However, these approaches do not provide a
holistic perspective of the project. Instead, they focus on the individual in Enterprise
System implementation projects. In contrast to that, the proposed thesis shall focus on
the project as unit of analysis to provide a more holistic perspective.
4 Methods
The research design shall be a multi-case study. Thereby, cases will be Enterprise
System implementation or development projects for commercial users. For each of the
five to ten projects, that are already completed before the analysis is done, two semistructured interviews will be conducted, one with the project manager and one with a
key-user or customer who uses the introduced software. The interviews will be used to
analyze the project configuration, that means to collect information out of three areas,
firstly about the project itself, the introduced software, the conditions of the project, and
the project management success, secondly about the user involvement and participation,
and thirdly about the task complexity. The interviews will be semi-structured to ensure
that on the one hand comparable information about all projects is collected and on the
other hand follow-up questions can be asked to understand the overall situation.
Next to the interviews, an online-based survey will be conducted to identify the
perceived project success. Therefore, the survey will mainly consist of four subparts
containing questions about usability (e.g. System Usability Scale), user experience (e.g.
Short User Experience Questionnaire), effective use (e.g. 18 questions developed by
4
Lauterbach (2015)), and user satisfaction (e.g. six questions proposed by McKinney,
Yoon, & Zahedi (2002)). The online-based survey will also include questions about the
task complexity (e.g. eight questions developed by Zimmer, Henry, & Butler, (2007)) to
get information about this aspect also from a user perspective.
While the results of the survey are already quantifiable, interviews will be analyzed
with the help of a coding strategy. This strategy helps to reduce and organize the data by
assigning labels to parts of the data to classify the given information (Myers, 2009).
Moreover, for the cross-case analysis a Qualitative Comparative Analysis, which
especially has been developed for a configurational perspective, will be used. In general
coding and analysis will be done based on methods that are similar to grounded theory
as defined by Myers (2009).
5
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