Rosacker, Kirsten M.; Olson, David L.: An Empirical Assessment of IT Project Selection and Evaluation Methods in State Government; in: Project Management Journal, Vol. 39 (2008), No. 1, pp. 4958.
Do project selection tools have an impact on project success? In order to answer this question Rosacker & Olson look into the usage of different quantitative and qualitative selection tools. As second step they try to link the tools to different success criteria.
Within their sample of 144 public IT projects (all in different U.S. states) the authors can only show limited correlations, using the F-Value [I don’t know about the distribution of the success variables, but if it isn’t normally distributed, the F-Test might have been to conservative and some effects which exist in real life, a classical example for the Type-2 Error or β-error].
- NPV/IIR selected projects perform better in cost adherence
- Projects selected based on ‚probability of completion‘ have a better overall performance
- Projects selected due to ‚mandatory requirements‘ have a better overall performance
- Projects selected with ’subjective assessment‘ perform better on their impact but perform weaker