J. van Ekris (The Netherlands)
Project management, delivery quality, customer retention
Repeat business is vital for the survival of software development organizations. It is very advantageous for a company to be able to use one project as a stepping stone for the next. However, many projects fail and even successful ones do not guarantee repeat business. Both academics and practitioners recognize that the way a project reaches its goals is also important in generating repeat business. This aspect of project management is called delivery quality. Although delivery quality is important for repeat business, it is an abstract term that isn’t easily manageable. Having a breakdown of delivery quality is necessary in order to make it easier to manage. In this article we test a possible breakdown of delivery quality. Although some researchers have used a standardized breakdown from another domain, that standard breakdown isn’t adapted to the business critical software development context, despite clear indications from research that modification might be needed. In this article we show that, based on empirical evidence, the most commonly used breakdown of delivery quality provides usable results but also omits an important factor. This factor is partnership, which is identified as an important factor for customers trusting suppliers with their business critical IT systems.
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