Research Method
The research questions for this study are “What are the contributing factors that enhance project performance (and success)?” and “How do managers use and understand these factors to develop strategies for enhancing project performance?” In order to respond to the first research question, the literature review findings discussed in the previous section were used to identify the contributing factors that can improve project performance (Table 1).
Of these factors, communication, collaborative culture, cohesive project team, participation in decision making, and changes in project goals are outcomes of project planning, a critical project management phase for project success (CII 1994, 1995; Kog and Loh 2012).
To respond to the second research question, “How do managers use and understand these factors to develop success strategies for enhancing project performance?,” the interpretive structural mod- eling (ISM) process, originally developed by Warfield (1973), which replicates mental models, was chosen due to the notion that strategies are more akin to mental models.
Interpretive structural modeling is a process that helps individ- uals or groups in structuring their tacit or collective knowledge into a model of interrelationships to enhance the ability of understand- ing complexity. The methodology helps to identify structure within a system of related elements, and provides an opportunity to ana- lyze it from different perspectives. For this purpose, ISM analyzes relationships among a group of elements and resolves them in a graphical representation of their directed relationships and hierar- chical levels. The elements may be objectives of a policy, goals of an organization, factors of assessment, and the like.
The fuzzy computer-based ISM was used for the collection and interpretation of data with respect to the factors identified and their nonuniform application across organizations (Kanungo and Bhatnagar 2002). It is a computer-assisted group methodology that can be used to identify relationships among the identified con- tributing factors and develop a structure of their relationships (Anantatmula and Kanungo 2006). This approach also allows man- agers and researchers to reach consensus and utilize the results in a contextually relevant manner providing meaningful leveraging frameworks for enhancing project performance. The ISM process,