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Top1. Introduction
Since the era of FOSS1, project management has facilitated through options, like the unrestricted use of project management software without any royalties as well as self-customized adjustments of the main stream version – but nevertheless projects are increasingly complex in a geometric growth.
Occasionally due to a high fragmentation of knowledge paired with the lack of key individuals, information bottlenecks may occur. There are a variety of project management tools, like RedMine, JIRA and legacy the MS-Project to make the complexity controllable – however, practice has shown that only a small selection is actually used (Fuchs, 2014). The reasons for these are varied, so manager often lack the time for incorporation or perhaps the company doesn’t want to invest in new software and the necessary training required. It often ends in the misuse of known application tools even if the presentation or application is unsuitable. The resulting representation of information should express the same facts in a homogeneous manner, but it sometimes tends to differ so much, hence leading to misinterpretations, or information loss occurs due to the lack of appropriate information processing capabilities.
Another problem may arise, not only in the generation of a proper information representation instance, but also in the variety of heterogeneous and partially incompatible software interfaces. The data exchange thus often remains limited to the project scope which then lacks a simple and open possibility to manage projects across the enterprise. As a final result, medium-sized enterprises already maintains multiple support systems, where information exists in a fragmented fashion. If information is needed in a holistic project context, several difficulties arise from this fact. The integrity of the project decisions due to the information provided may therefore be questionable, and the respective responsibility unclear. Studies have shown (Atesmen, 2014), especially in project status meetings of software development that psychosocial stresses are sometimes precarious, since the available data is often inconsistent and unclear.
Precisely in this area, the approach seeks to provide new ways to improve the information integrity and uniform presentation as to facilitate decision making, mitigate psychosocial stressors and to increase overall productivity. The concept follows the approach of conventional agreements, which constitute the essential foundation of the Applicative Research Concept, mostly based on existing artifacts such as project manual, feature roadmaps and a version controlled repository as a host system – so there are no explicit requirements which are uncommon to IT-projects. Figure 1 illustrates the embedding of the applicative research concept in Design Oriented Research Methodology – as end artifact the software prototype can be seen as the implementation of a framework. It can be further argued that, although the framework implementation herein is based on the meta-data of a repository for version control system for software – that the framework model is much more generally applicable. In principle, all host systems are useful where projects are stored in a repository and can be identified with meta-tags.
Figure 1. The applicative research concept
1.1. Intended Audience
This work addresses primarily researchers and professionals in information processing and its representation as well as experts in project management especially in IT. The theoretical aspects should appeal to individuals, who see themselves as implementers and user of the conceptional framework or just want to deepen the present approach. The approach of conventional arrangement through collaborative sessions should also appeal to social scientists.