Investigating the Impacts of Managerial Turnover/Succession on Software Project Performance

Abstract:

The persistent turnover problem in the software field combined with the tendency of managerial succession to promote instability make this phenomenon of crucial importance to the student as well as the practitioner of software project management. The focus of most studies to date has been on the use of aggregated statistical data to answer macro questions regarding aggregates of organizations. On the other hand, there is a serious lack of micro-empirical analysis of turnover/succession and its impacts on managerial performance. This paper reports the results of a simulation-based laboratory study to investigate the impacts of managerial turnover/succession on software project performance. Specifically, the study examines the staffing and cost/schedule trade-off choices of successor project managers, and compares them with the choices made by managers who run their projects from start to finish without interruption. The results indicate that managerial turnover/succession can lead to a discernible (albeit unintended) shift in cost/schedule trade-off choices, affecting staff allocations and ultimately project performance in terms of both cost and duration.

Key Words and Phrases::

• managerial succession
• managerial turnover
• software project management
• software project staffing

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tarek K. Abdel-Hamid

Tarek K. Abdel-Hamid is Associate Professor of Information Systems in the Department of Administrative Sciences at the Naval Postgraduate School. Prior to joining NPS, he spent two and a half years at the Stanford Research Institute consulting internationally on information systems issues. Since 1986 he has been an advisor to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab on the development of computer-based tools for software project management. He received a B.S. degree in aeronautical engineering from Cairo University, Egypt, in 1972, and a Ph.D. in management information systems from M.I.T. in 1984. His research interests focus on software project management, system dynamics, and management information systems. He is the coauthor of Software Project Dynamics: An Integrated Approach and has authored or coauthored more than twenty papers in journals such as Communications of the ACM, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, IEEE Software, and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Dr. Abdel-Hamid is a member of the ACM, SIM, IEEE-CS, and the System Dynamics Society.