Explanations for budget and schedule overrun revisited – a configurational perspective on IT projects

Although the existing literature portrays information technology projects as complex, dynamic, socio-technical endeavors, research on cost and schedule performance mostly focuses on single factors in isolation. In this paper, we use a configurational approach to overcome this disconnect. We collected interview and objective data from 30 IT projects and conducted a qualitative comparative analysis to examine how configurations of project conditions relate to cost and schedule adherence. Our analysis shows four configurations associated with budget or schedule adherence: Prestigious feedback-based projects, lucky projects, disciplined projects, and team-based projects. We discuss the implications of these results for information technology project management research and practice.