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International Journal of Information Technology Project Management (IJITPM)
An Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association New in 2010
Editor-in-Chief: John Wang, Montclair State University, USA
Published: Quarterly

Special Issue On Productivity Management for IT Projects

http://www.igi-global.com/journals/details.asp?ID=7716&v=callForPapersSpecial

Submission Due Date: March 15, 2010

Guest Editors
Ricardo Colomo-Palacios
Adrián Hernández-López

Introduction

Productivity management continues to prove a challenge for IT projects. While the manufacturing industries have designed and tested methods for determining productivity, IT industry lags behind in terms of methods for evaluating the outcomes and predicting the effort required to complete the projects. The importance of productivity management in this sector is due to be a key factor for knowledge activities and a crucial factor for decision making in global market. Within IT industry there are two main areas of production that can coexist in an IT Project: software and hardware. Focusing on IT software project, there are two main types of projects: new development and maintenance, which productivity seems similar but need to be analysed separately.

On the one hand, IT software projects productivity metrics are mainly based on ratios between the size of delivered software and the effort performed to obtain it. Following this direction, FP and SLOC measurements are misleading because the overall development may be unproductive even though programming productivity has increased. There are some recent proposals such as measuring productivity based on postmortem Function Points, using multiple size measures, and specific methods for methodologies such as Object Oriented. On the other hand, the factors that affect IT Productivity are widely accepted, i.e. increasing store constraints, timing constraints, reliability requirements, high level languages, team size, requirements volatility, staff tools skills, staff availability, customer participation, and project duration. Despite of its acceptance, the influence, positive or negative, of some of these factors in IT Productivity is not clear and may vary with external factors such as business sector and outsourcing ratio.

Moreover, metrics based on code only represent the productivity of coding activities, while other activities such as management, analysis, and design are out of the scope of those metrics. Therefore, the relation between productivity and non coding activities in software development projects has not been proven. Finally, the use of code measures such as SLOC is not a sufficient measure by itself; multidimensional inputs must be included in measuring productivity.

Objective of the Special Issue

The objective of this special issue is the definition of new models, measures and assessment methods may shed light about productivity in IT projects, especially in software development projects as it was done for software maintenance projects. In turn, companies need to establish their own productivity metrics in addition to benchmarking their data. Furthermore, the construction of a state of the art about IT productivity regarding software development may establish a standpoint for future researches in this area.

For this special issue, we welcome work that explores the complex issue of productivity in IT projects. Research employing innovative models, measures, and assessment methods will be especially welcome. Papers considering productivity at different levels: organizational team and individual will be considered. What are the inputs into the software production process? What influence has productivity in IT projects? How productivity in IT projects can be measured? What are the outputs of the software production process? Can Function Points represent all that are produced from a software production process? How a model for productivity management for IT projects can be build? Is there a relationship between project methodology and productivity in IT projects?