Abstract
Motivated by scarce academic consideration of project management control frameworks, this article explores usage, value and structure of frameworks with a focus on the popular Control Objectives for IT and related Technology (CobiT) construct. We attempt to add to an empirically validated structure of internal control over IT project management by including CobiT's views on the intended domain of content. Results from the empirical survey indicate that the metrics suggested by CobiT are regarded as feasible and important by project management professionals, and are regularly used in controlling practice. Experience, regularity of significant projects and the size of the hosting organisations, however, seem to be stronger moderators of success rates than the use of a management control system with or without support of CobiT. CobiT's suggestions are of generic nature and in particular useful for programme performance management. The latent dimensions of project quality on process and activity levels were not validated and gaps to other project assessment models were identified.
1. Introduction
As organisations worldwide constantly strive for competitive advantage, major tools in pursuing their objectives are well functioning projects and resulting project organisations (Lindkvist, 2008; van Donk & Molloy, 2008). Management control of project progress throughout their lifecycles is becoming increasingly recognised for its importance. Recent findings highlight that management control influences task completion competency and, thus, project management performance (Liu et al., 2010). Internal management control is seen as an attempt to optimise employee behaviour in a way that allows the achievement of organisational goals (Flamholtz et al., 1985). Henderson and Lee's (1992) study revealed a positive relationship between the adoption rates of management control and project management performance. In traditional project management, managers concentrate on monitoring project progress against schedules and budgets. More contemporary approaches embrace a variety of variables of control at different levels and stages of the project process, e.g., user contributions, project team task completion competency, and individual project team's performance (Liu et al., 2010).
7. Summary and conclusions
Considerable potential exists for academic research to evaluate IT project management control systems and their effectiveness to determine value for organisations. In this paper we set out to see whether such control systems are used and if control variables are valid, important and used in project management controlling practice. The set-up of this research was guided by critically questioning suggestions from the Control Objectives for IT and related Technology (CobiT) framework, a popular framework used worldwide for IT controlling purposes.
