Impediments to Effective Management of Project Interdependencies: A Study of IT/IS Project Portfolios

Research Method

The objective of the study is to understand the difficulties associated with managing project interdependencies in IT/IS project portfolios environments and pinpoint the drivers for these difficulties. The nature of this study is qualitative. It aims to capture people’s views and experiences on complexity issues and factors that led to bottlenecks in handling project interdependencies. The qualitative research approach helps to understand problems’ real contexts and settings through people who have experienced these problems (Creswell 2012). How this can be done is described in Yin (2011). In qualitative research, interviews are rich sources of information and most preferred technique for collecting in-depth information in the informants’ own words. Semi-structured approach for conducting the interviews is found to be appropriate for the data collection since it gives freedom for emerging questions during the interview (Myers 2009). To undertake the semi-structured interviews with more efficient measures, we formulated multiple themes of questions as follows: