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Risk, Process Maturity, and Project Performance: An Empirical Analysis of US Federal Government Technology Projects
Author(s) -
Mishra Anant,
Das Sidhartha R.,
Murray James J.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
production and operations management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.279
H-Index - 110
eISSN - 1937-5956
pISSN - 1059-1478
DOI - 10.1111/poms.12513
Subject(s) - maturity (psychological) , project management , business , capability maturity model integration , project risk management , project sponsorship , process (computing) , risk management , context (archaeology) , capability maturity model , government (linguistics) , process management , project management triangle , risk analysis (engineering) , operations management , opm3 , finance , computer science , economics , philosophy , software , linguistics , biology , paleontology , operating system , psychology , developmental psychology , management , software development , programming language , software development process
In recent years, there has been increasing pressure on the US federal government to reduce spending and improve the management of its technology projects. Mitigating the adverse impact of risks on the performance of these projects presents a significant challenge for its stakeholders. Our research examines this challenge in two steps. First, we identify and define a set of salient risks in federal technology projects—specifically, complexity risk and contracting risk in the planning process, and execution risk in the execution process. Next, we investigate whether higher levels of process maturity, assessed by the Capability Maturity Model Integration ( CMMI ) framework, mitigate the negative effect of project risks on project performance. The analysis of time‐series data collected from 82 federal technology projects across 519 quarterly time periods indicates that each of the three types of risks has a significant negative effect on project performance. This finding highlights the practical significance of managing these risks in the federal technology project context. Further, we find that increasing levels of process maturity attenuate the negative effect of project risks on the performance of federal technology projects. However, the attenuation effects are consequential only at high levels of project risks; at low levels of project risk, increasing levels of process maturity can adversely affect project performance. To demonstrate the financial implications of increasing process maturity levels in federal technology projects, we examine the magnitude of project cost savings (and overruns) across different levels of CMMI and project risks. In summary, our study contributes to the sparse literature on public sector operations by addressing the understudied context of federal technology projects, and provides a nuanced examination of the implications of process maturity in managing the risk to performance relationship in such projects.