Project performance development framework: An approach for developing performance criteria & measures for information systems (IS) projects

Performance criteria typically reflect the values of the project stakeholders in how they will be viewing their projects. A critical analysis of current research shows that several key challenges being faced in information systems (IS) projects include the lack of clearly defined objectives, mismatched stakeholders' expectations and lack of sufficient or formal methods to aid practitioners in developing relevant performance criteria. This is accentuated by growing calls to rethink the traditional measurement paradigm. Moreover, most of the known solutions in practice are without structured or easily implementable procedures to elicit and develop performance criteria and measures. Against this background, the paper proposes a formal method to develop a comprehensive set of performance criteria or objectives grounded in the views of the project stakeholders and associated measures aligned to these objectives. The project performance framework (PPDF) primarily relies on the principles and advantages of the value focused thinking (VFT) and goal question metric (GQM) to elicit and develop these performance criteria and associated measures based on the values of the stakeholders in the project. Three project cases are used to illustrate and assess the model.