ICT as a means of generating knowledge for Project ...

ICT as a means of generating knowledge for Project Management

Abstract: This research is aimed at businesses or organizations that find in the information and communication technology ICT, a means to generate knowledge in project management, recognizing competitive advantages by leveraging the basic specifications that techniques, tools and applications used by ICT give as an important contribution for profit in the execution of a project. These technologies are analyzed from the main factors assessed for both success and failure of a project, among which lack of collaborative work from the project team and others involved can be evidenced, as well as their interactions and the way each individual tackles and meets their functions. In a competitive environment, highlighting that collaborative work, performed through the use and appropriation of information and communication technology is fundamental, increasing not only the sense of belonging to the execution of a project, but the application of better practices, built out of mistakes and experiences from the team members. As a consequence to this approach, this paper shows the inclusion of the use and appropriation of ICT as a means of generating knowledge in project management. Keywords: Knowledge management, project management, social management of projects, information and communication technology ICT, collaborative planning.

1 Introduction “Nowadays companies must get to the bottom of their organizations in order to reinvent their strategies”[1]. New trends force us to move and adapt to the use of new tools applied in recent technology, due to the fact that he who doesn’t evolve, dies. ICT are increasingly impacting management aspects of everyday life activities, these have been playing an important role in fields such as education, health and economics, amongst others, with a variety of purposes like informational, process and project management through simpler methods, team collaboration and e-services. It can be observed how ICT are involved in global development in each of the fields of science governed by the information and knowledge society, being them strategic support in the management of new projects, showing the competitive advantages that their implementation brings, as they relate computing science, processes, virtual and online

technology; with combinations of hardware and software capable of interchange, process and manage information and knowledge for projects. ICT, when involved in project management, creates great challenges for project managers, since it demands from them skills and abilities to generate added collaborative value when involving project team members in a teamwork environment, synchronized and aimed to the achievement of goals, significantly improving communication, risk evaluation, control and planning of all project processes.

2 Fundamentation 2.1 Concept of Project as a social system According to [2], from PMI 1, a Project is “a temporary endeavor undertaken in order to create a product, a service or a unique result”, meaning temporary effort as the definition of the beginning and the end of a project. From this definition, this analysis could start by asking: Which factors determine a project as successful? A survey by PWC 2 [3], shows that the factors that determine the success of a project are: stakeholders 3 satisfaction (20%), on time delivery (19%), budget compliance (18%), profit production (17%) quality (15%) ROI value (9%) and other factors (2%). Stakeholders satisfaction could be considered as an indicator that implicitly contains the other factors. For instance, for the client it means that products were delivered on time, within the budget and with the quality promised by the supplier. Furthermore it should be noted that it is the main indicator of the success of a project. On the other hand, it must be noted that stakeholders satisfaction undoubtedly depends on their commitment and on the way they interact, for it is important that there is an open and permanent communication among them. Considering that a social system [4], is basically defined as “a set of relations among human beings who interact in many ways” in a project, the social system includes all the people that make part of it and the relations among them and the outer world. The social significance of projects is partly based on the steady growth of social media such as blogs, forums, content communities and social networks. Regarding the latter, a study by comScore 4, presents world order data indicating that between June 2010 and June 2011, the total number of Internet visitors increased by 10%; while the increase in the number of visitor of social networks went up in 22% [5], trends that favor success in project management. 1

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PMI Project Management Institute is a non-profit association for professionals in project management. Its main objectives are: to define professional standards in project management and creating knowledge through research and promote project management as a profession, through their certification programs Price Waterhouse Coopers is a professional services firm with presence in over 120 countries, organized into three business areas: audit and technology risk, business and financial consulting, legal and tax advice. Group of individuals involved in the project that may affect or be affected by the results of the project itself. ComScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), company whose purpose is to measure how people surf the digital world and turn the measurement results into relevant information for maximizing their clients digital investment.

2.2 Social project management Social project management (SPM) means the collaboration among all project members, where each project is viewed as a social network. Two of the promoters of social project management are; the project approach based on the social interaction of people and technology [6]. The former is explained from the identification of project planning as a living process where it is important that those who perform the work are part of this process because they can contribute with relevant knowledge based on their previous experience; this scheme is known as Collaborative Planning [6]. It must be noted that in Collaborative Planning, the role of the project manager changes since planning, direction and control of the project is not 100% their sole responsibility Participation of parties increases when they have a bigger understanding of the project because it is “transparent”, which is to say that all the people involved have access to the information about decisions, who made them and why. From this point of view, technology fosters the social significance of projects because it facilitates human relations and the ability to organize and plan. According to [6], the most exciting use of new technology is when it is applied to build and maintain human relations, due to the fact that the result is a greater participation from the team to develop new and more effective ways to organize activities in a project. It could be said that from the viewpoint of collaborative planning, the premise is teamwork, which increases the sense of belonging from the parties when it is articulated with the possibility of a greater participation in making decisions that are relevant to the project, this could be reflected in the level of satisfaction, which is one of the main factors to determine whether a project is successful or not. For ProjectPlace 5 two of the benefits of social Project management are [7]: i) Motivation within the project, today, a scarce resource. It is baffling to see many project managers using a large amount of hours in planning resources such as time and money without taking into account the social dynamics of their teams, that is to say that they do not take the time to find out if the team enjoys what is being done, if they communicate with each other or if they consider the significance of assigned tasks. ii) Innovation as a social endeavor. Creativity and invention have been traditionally viewed as a solitary sport. A sole genius creates a new idea and changes the world without anybody’s help. It has been recently proved that this picture is wrong. A new idea is a network. New ideas depend on social encounters; when shared, the idea adds new knowledge and gets more people involved in making it come true. According to research [8], the planning scheme of traditional project management is obsolete, since it is strongly dependant on the plans of the project and its constant upgrades (management as planning) the execution takes place on completion of planned tasks and, according to authors, the progress of the project is controlled through feedback methods as those used to control thermostats [9]. It is important to consider these reflections because the planning scheme in project management is widely recognized. It is then worthwhile to note that ICT supports the reflection in this field and could help in the validation of the statement in the sense that work is 5

Project Place International. It is a European company that provides project collaboration solutions on the Web. Since 1998, it has been leading the development of online project tools.

done in real time within a collaborative environment; therefore the planning scheme in management will produce results that provide real evidence. They also state [8] that management as planning fails mainly because it is impossible that plans are upgraded in an effective way and it is assumed that in the execution, tasks input as well as resources will be available in the expected conditions. It must be noted that [2] 5 process groups are defined in project direction: starting, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and closing; where the planning process group is defined as composed by those processes performed to establish the full extent of the effort, to define and refine objectives and to develop the line of action required to achieve those goals. According to this, it is advisable to revise at this point the results of the second worldwide survey prepared by PWC [3], about the current status of project management, from which it can be concluded that the main reasons for project failure are related to planning itself: wrong estimations, breach of scheduled times, scope changes and insufficient resources, these reasons constitute 50% of the reasons for project failure in organizations that took part in the survey. It will then be a challenge for project managers to strengthen the use and appropriation of ICT in all project team members to learn from best practices, experiences and expert opinions, in order to counteract these issues, promoting collaborative environment and teamwork, in search of a solution to incidents that delay the implementation of the project and result in the use of more resources and budget. 2.3 Trends in ICT that support knowledge management in the social management of projects In the predictions by IDC 6 [10], about ICT trends, it is argued that this industry is in the middle of a cycle (20-25 years) in the change of a technological platform for growth and innovation”. [10] has called this platform as the third platform, based on mobile devices, applications, internet services, mobile broadband networks, large data analysis and social technologies. The features of presented trends by [10] for 2013, are basically three; opportunity for growth, impact on industry and implication of significant structural changes on businesses, industries and on projects.

3 Question ¿Is it possible to create knowledge from the use and appropriation of ICT in social management of projects, where according to PWC [3], one of the main issues for being unsuccessful is precisely the lack of communication among the members of the team involved in the project?

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International Data Corporation, is a global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for technology markets, information technology, telecommunications and consumer products.

4 Methodology To build this paper in which ICT are adapted as a means for generating knowledge in social management of projects, we used the process of identifying information which was afterwards located, selected, gathered and synthesized. This process began with the formulation of the question that oriented the search in the documentary compilation of this study, then sources were identified and selected, afterwards the search and document retrieval strategy was defined, next the evaluation and analysis of information was performed and finally ICT as a means to support the creation of knowledge in social management of projects was published.

5 Results Nowadays companies, through their technology departments, must face very important challenges such as the proper use of technology infrastructure, responsiveness according to business strategies and the flexibility to adapt to changes, among others, everything under the pressure of the restrictions that suppose achieving the execution and obtaining the scope, finishing on time, fitting the assigned budget, meeting quality standards, mitigating risks and maximizing the use of increasingly scarce resources. Because of all the above, in meeting these challenges, the use of ICT in project management is a new form of creating knowledge. Here are some:

5.1 Virtualization In project management the term virtualization comes in response to the implementation of creative solutions which are necessary in goal achievement and in strategies for planning, execution, monitoring, control and closing. Virtualization, from a technologic perspective, is understood as a methodology that splits resources from a computer into multiple runtime environments through the application of one or even more concepts or technologies which can be hardware and software partitioning, shared time, complete or partial machine simulation, emulation and service quality [11]. That is, the abstraction of physical resources where one machine can run multiple operating systems, each one of them with their own applications running concurrently. Given these new techniques used in companies to improve efficiency of their technological infrastructure, project direction, through managers, meet challenges when controlling their working team since in many cases they are not placed in the same physical space, but still succeed must be ensured in the implementation of projects. The key then is to have a good communication; this of course, implies that we need to talk about the Virtual Project Manager. Today having

a virtual team is almost a norm and, for excellent management, a project manager must take into account not only ICT but management skills related to leadership, confidence, monitoring and communication, the latter being the most critical of all because the final result of the project depends on it, since stakeholders should clearly share the goals that must be achieved from the project itself. Virtualization has enabled the appropriation of better communication practices, through them the project manager has been able to implement among members of their team the establishment of a clear communication plan, mastering technology, carrying out structured meetings and using e-mail efficiently, among others. Therefore, a virtual project manager should understand that is fundamental to maintain and permanently improve communication with team members.

5.2 Cloud computing services The term “cloud” comes from the representation of Internet through the drawing of a cloud as the abstraction of its infrastructure in computer network charts. Cloud computing is a model of service provision such as access to applications, use of infrastructure and storage through Internet under a payment scheme on users demand. For NIST 7, cloud computing is defined as a model to allow proper and on-demand access to a set of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be provided rapidly and made available for clients with minimal management effort and interaction with the service supplier. This is a model that comprises five essential characteristics, three service models and four implementation models [13]. The main characteristics that identify the cloud are: Scalability: allows meeting customer's changing needs over demand in the use of a service; on demand selfservice: services may be requested by the user or client directly over the Internet. User pays only for time of service; ubiquitous access to the network: services are accessible from any device with network access (personal computers or mobile devices), availability is 7/24; pool resources: attention to multiple users independently of the location of the resource and, service measurement: each resource that the user consumes and which is chargeable is measured not only for charging purposes but also for control. Some examples could be considered as basic cloud services, for they are very popular today, such as access to an email account, social

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National Institute of Standards and Technology de EE.UU: Federal Agency of the Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness in the U.S. through advances in measurement science, standards and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve quality of life.

networks (Facebook and LinkedIn), webinars 8 and document management. It is precisely the last in which project management succeeds in creating knowledge in the project team because updated and timely information is shared in real time. The different types of cloud services can be grouped in three models: • Infrastructure as a service: (IaaS). It is based on the virtualization that offers resources related to network technology, processing, disk space and database storage. An example of IaaS implementing is Amazon EC2 (Amazon’s Elastic compute Cloud), where clients access is granted through a web interface of virtual devices. • Platform as a service (PaaS). This model offers whatever is required to cover the life cycle of a project: analysis, design, unfolding development, tests, documentation and maintenance. Google App Engine is an example of PaaS, since it permits creation and hosting of web applications through technologies such as Java. • Software as a service (Saas). It is a software distribution model where the supplier provides maintenance, support and operation of applications that will be used during a contracted period of time; users’ access is allowed through an API from the Internet. According to [14], Cloud computing benefits for project management are: complex project management that were not feasible in the past due to processing limitations and storage or network capacity within an organization; it also offers collaboration in real team among project teams scattered all over the world, furthermore it permits a rapid staging response, implementation and removal of a variety of computing environments based on the web as needed to test or validate an application and uses a wide range of tools based on the web. Cloud computing also generates, by reduction of operating load, available time for creativity and innovation because allows companies to work on business objectives, or research and development. It enables analysis of multiple transactions in a highly distributed environment and moves towards green ICT with less energy consumption and less C02 production. Some projects related to the creation of systems for project management based on the cloud are: • [15] The creation of a Project Management System based on the cloud as SAAS is proposed as a project. The characteristics of this system are: it provides solutions to the lack of management skills and constant variation in project scope; it allows active participation in the development of the project. Each stakeholder will have access according to the priviledges defined for

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Webinars: Seminars transmitted via World Wide Web with specific date and time, its main feature is the interaction between the speaker and audience participants who are connected through their computers

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them; transparency between the customer and the company and implementation of agile methodologies in software development model must be noted. Small and medium companies are organizations that can benefit the most from cloud services, not only for the cost-benefit relation, but for access to new services, techniques and tools that directly impact every business model [16]. Competencies refer to: complex structures of processes that people put into action and creation for problem solving or performing of daily life activities in professional or work contexts, aimed at the construction and transformation of reality; integrating knowledge on different areas such as knowing how to know (see, analyze, understand and explain), how to do (performance based on procedures and strategies), how to be involved (participation and collaborative work) and knowledge about how to be (selfmotivation, initiative, leadership and creativity) [16] [17] [18].

5.3 Storage of information It is important to note that in project management the proper governance of technological resources ensures efficiency, opportunity and availability of information; it also makes reference to the security issues that concern the proper storage of the most important resource of the company and its projects, being this “information”. Today there are many storage solutions, choosing one above another is relative to each company, what is important is that information is properly stored and with the required safety standards for correct operation. In the market there are storage solutions both in the cloud as well as in physical space. A cloud storage solution drastically reduces costs in both hand work as well as equipment as physical information is not stored. However, one must be careful because cloud storage solutions are subject to policies of the company that provides them, and in many cases, the owner of the information is not even the company that pays for this service [17]. If decision is made to store information physically, the quality improvement of the availability of information must be considered, and for this there are many solutions in the market. One of the solutions with greater impact are SAN storage solutions that via fiber channel provide better availability and speed of access to information. Though costly because of the investment on hardware, this solution may become a trend over the next decade, as opposed to Cloud Computing competition, for they will compete against the advantages of one over the other. Although cost reduction is a critical issue in business, and therefore in their projects, the tendency is oriented towards solutions in which the company can have the sense of owning information. Over the next decade storage solutions in the cloud will not reach a reliability point, neither the safety perception in critical process, as it won’t reach a point in which companies will choose this solution. Managers must choose the most

convenient solution in terms of storage, assessing convenience of the relation costbenefit, without forgetting information safety. Although global companies increasingly place their information in the cloud, this latent trend as a current technological solution will make that project managers reach the desired impact in accordance with organizational factors such as: company size, process that are to be stored, storage option (cloud or physical) and criticality of information in case it falls into the hands of others. Therefore, the trend in storage solutions both physical as in the cloud will increase, but the response to storage solution will depend on each company according to what is stored and where it is stored.

5.4 Projects management and ICT Managers will face a challenge with the revolutionary changes in terms of technology and productivity; there is a state of transition where mind and cultural schemes must be broken. Managers must adapt to change, envisioning their business growth with plans for the organizations to lead changes, thus facing the risks that may appear, and the doubts or assumptions as preventive action. Identifying opportunities should not always offer the same products or services, showing monotony in business is a factor of economical deterioration that causes the loss of strength in the market. Ways to attract new clients must be visualized, motivating them and creating the need of having the company in mind as their first choice over other organizations. Technology corresponds to inventions, new things to be used in solving the problems that arise day after day through a body of knowledge that managers should use to their advantage in the life of the project. In any project, when implementing ICT, managers should know their working environment, conducting a compilation of information to know the needs of the target audience, the resources that the organization has at hand and the processes that take place on a daily basis. Currently, most of the organizations use at least the e-mail as a means of communication, as well as text messaging, but are people really acquainted with the proper use and real advantage of these tools? There are resources which sometimes are underused as intranet which purpose is internal communication. Other times websites are outdated or in many cases people are not aware of their existence. Because of this, before implementing ICT, the staff should be educated in digital culture through training or upgrading sessions, so that when involved with other technological resources such as implementation of collaborative systems to generate knowledge, the issue about company technology in the organization and its project is not new for them [20].

6 Conclusions • The success factors of a project are grouped in the stakeholders’ satisfaction. Social management of projects aims for project success through the use of tools that will strengthen the relations between those involved in the project which brings along a greater sense of belonging that will be reflected on the project results [21]. • The factors of project failure are related to flaws in the planning stage. From the point of view of social management of projects, the aim is that everyone involved in the project can have access to relevant information through collaborative planning for decision making, so that any member of the team can influence the action plans based on their own experience in a particular matter to be solved [22]. • The social management of projects promotes collective innovation since its collaborative environment enables permanent interaction of those involved in the project and thus opens a space to share innovative ideas that together could become tools that optimize work in new products or services. • Trends in ICT that support project management such as Cloud Computing benefit even SMEs since justifiable profits are obtained in relation to accessible prices according to the needs of these companies. • The need to address the factors of failure of a project that come from planning and collaborative environment posed by technologies such as Cloud Computing inevitably leads to greater emphasis on the importance of the staff and their interrelation. • Having the latest technology is not enough because organizations should ensure that projects implemented via ICT, obtain the proposed goals, it is for this reason that project management is a task closely linked to ICT, where global vision of a product or service is required; service or product which destination is a client and its aim is to solve a specific need of the organization. It implies planning that ensures budget compromise, task schedule and requirements that have been agreed with the final user. • With the rise of these new tools of communication, companies are increasingly forced to maintain growth rate themselves through the implementation of new technological strategies that enable sustainability in the market. That is to say that their job is to be in steady evolution in all areas, being project management one of their priorities. • It is through projects that a company can improve competitiveness or generate economy in any of their areas. To the point in which maximum profit of these technologies is made, a project manager could carry out the most convenient ones according to the required development

• Being communication of vital importance among all members of the team and project stakeholders, becoming aware of the use of these tools in order to detect risks and opportunities, may help in establishing the key points to project success. • Project management in virtualized spaces makes things easier since stakeholders and needs can be easily coordinated through the Web and virtualized offices. The use of ICT in business environments and in project management allows the concentration of productive capital achieving the formation of large virtual companies and reaching success of projects at a fast pace and with the required opportunity without geographical conditions or tools impeding their achievement.

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