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Top1. Introduction
Information technology (IT) systems are crucial to the success of contemporary businesses. They facilitate processes improvement (Davenport, 2013), enable communication between organizational departments (Wang, et al., 2022), facilitate the integration of supply chain partners, and are central components for executing many organizational strategies (Drnevich & Croson, 2013). Given the importance of IT, it is unsurprising that in 2021 U.S. companies invested approximately $1.94 trillion on technology (Sava, 2021).
Despite the importance of IT to organizational success, many firms fail to effectively manage the quality aspects of their technology initiatives. The negative repercussions of this persistent problem are considerable. For example, 11.4% of the investment spent on technology projects is wasted due to poor project performance (PMI, 2021); one report found that 80% of technology professionals working on software projects spent more than half their time correcting quality issues (Geneca, 2017). The consequences of poor quality management for IT projects are not limited to the performance of the systems development process. The desired level of business value received from IT projects is often not achieved; 41% of firms report mixed results for the delivered value provided by completed IT initiatives (Feldman, 2014). In 2020, U.S. companies experienced $1.56 trillion in total costs from operational failures caused by poor quality software solutions (Krasner, 2020). As these statistics illustrate, organizations need to reconsider their approach to managing the quality aspects of their IT initiatives.
Quality management can be broadly defined as a formalized approach to managing business processes in an effort to achieve quality goals and objectives. The concepts and philosophies of quality management have been adopted by firms throughout the world in the form of quality programs, such as ISO certification and Six Sigma, to improve products and services. The core values shared by these quality programs include a focus on the customer, leadership, incremental or continuous improvement, and the idea that prevention is less expensive than correction. While quality management has received a great deal of attention in manufacturing and services contexts, its concepts have only recently been applied to IT projects (Marchewka, 2012). The focus of this research is project quality management, which focuses on the processes used to execute an IT project. Project quality management ensures that the outcome of a completed project will meet or exceed client/project sponsor expectations, while also satisfying the needs for which the technology initiative was undertaken.
Of particular interest to this study is the quality management approach articulated by W. Edwards Deming. In his book, Out of the Crisis (1986), Deming provides a foundation for quality management based on his set of 14 Points for Management. While Deming’s philosophies on quality management have been embraced around the world, minimal research has empirically tested the Deming model, a theoretical model grounded in the Deming management method (DMM). Given that many of Deming’s 14 Points for Management are being applied to project management in practice in an effort to improve quality, the aim of this research is to conduct a rigorous empirical examination of the Deming model in the context of IT projects.