1.

Introduction

Project management is used to carry out a deliverable (OGC, 2007). This deliverable could be
a unique product, service, or a capability (Project Management Institute, 2008). Delivering
products and services are not a big deal since once the customer needs are clearly defined; the
project scope is developed based on these needs. This scope becomes a clear target for project
manager to deliver it on schedule and on budget with taking into consideration risk issues.
However, this is not the case of delivering a new organizational capability such as a new
information system project.

While project management practices are expected to affect the quality of implementation of
a new information system project in terms of time and cost, it is not clearly known whether
they will enable organizations to integrate this new organizational/process capability in the
organization processes. Ram et al. (2013) found that even though the use of project
management practices have a significant impact on implementing an Enterprise Resource
Planning system (ERP system) on schedule and on budget, they found that these practices do
not have a significant impact on benefits realization in the post-implementation phase. This
argument is supported by a widely cited paper “IT doesn’t matter”. It shows that IT projects
fail to have an effect on organization performance (Carr, 2003). Additionally, it has been
perceived that IT investments are not associated with the organization productivity and profits
(Brynjolfsson, 1993). Indeed, there are many explanations for that. One of them is that
organizations need time to realize benefits from the new system (Schryen, 2013). Nonetheless,
most of researchers argue that the active benefits management is required (Remenyi and
Sherwood-Smith, 1998). It is also claimed that benefits management is the clue in this IT
paradox in the professional handbooks (Thorp, 1998). Although this debate is too old to be
used now, the current IT failure projects, in terms of inability to realize its expected outcomes,
are still quite high (Panorama, 2013).

Meanwhile it is argued that the solution is benefits management practices (Ashurst et al.,
2008), this research comes to examine this argument across different organizations to discover
whether these practices are really the main drivers of successful benefits realization from
implementing the new IS projects. Additionally, there are some evidences that successful
project management practices have an influence on the benefits realization in post-
implementation phase of the new IS projects. However, it is not clearly known whether
benefits management has the same influence, more, or less on the benefits realization of the
new IS projects.

To bridge this research gap, this research is developed to understand to what extent the
benefit management practices have an impact on IS business success. This research
contributes to the project management and Information Systems disciplines since it gives an
insightful argument regarding the role of project management and benefits management
practices in realizing IS business success.
 2. Literature Review
IS business success and project success are intertwined concepts. Nevertheless, IS business
success is a broader concept than the project success since the project success focuses only
on the short term goals, i.e. scope limited to project lifecycle (Davis, 2014). However,
information systems business success and project success concepts have a common arena
between them, stakeholder satisfaction. Although the traditional aim of project management
is to deliver the “iron triangle” of cost, time, and quality, the success models for project
management nowadays consider stakeholders satisfaction (Atkinson, 1999).

Nevertheless, the concept of “stakeholders’ satisfaction” could be misleading. Even though

stakeholder acceptance in project management perspective focuses on the acceptance of the
scope, time, and cost, the stakeholder acceptance in terms of IS business success is realizing
the targeted benefits of the new information system. For instance, delivering a piece of
software in time, on cost, and free of bugs is a criteria for project management success.
However, if this piece of software is unable to realize expected benefits, due to other reasons
such as improper training to users, it could not be declared that there is Information systems
business success. Therefore, this research defines information system business success as a
successful implementation of projects in time and on budget with the desired quality and
realizing the targeted benefits from these projects.

Furthermore, Information Systems projects are different from any other product delivering
projects since an integration of a new information system into existing business processes is
not easy and had a lot of troubles due to resistant to change (Davenport, 1998; Peppard and
Rowland, 1995). Consequently, there are two islands of schools that are rarely bridged in
research, as shown in Error! Reference source not found.. The soft school that interprets IS
business success by the “use” (Venkatesh et al., 2003), “effective use” (Burton-Jones and
Grange, 2012), or “perceived net benefits” (Petter et al., 2008b; DeLone and McLean, 2003).
On the other research island, the action school, the benefits management school, focuses on
active management of benefits (Remenyi and Sherwood-Smith, 1998) and focuses on benefits
planning, auditing, and exploitation (Ward and Daniel, 2006).

On one island, the first school, the soft one, believes that the major driver of success is the
“use” (Venkatesh and Bala, 2008). The “use” is the cornerstone in its theories; the more the
use, the more benefits will be realized and, therefore, more “success” will be achieved.
Therefore, all these researches consider the “use” variable as a mediator factor between what
can be done and the success of the system (DeLone and McLean, 2003). This school is involved
in perception, attitude, behavior, motivation, and intention. It is criticized because they do not
help the responsible person in achieving benefits from the new IS projects. Even though
Burton-Jones and Grange (2012) consider the learning action as a controllable variable for
managers to achieve the effective use, one action is not sufficient for achieving the effective
use and also this is not a management framework to guide benefit realization process.

On the other island, the action school focuses on developing models and approaches for
managing benefits in order to achieve the desired benefits, business case. The roadmap, the
planning, of setting and achieving the business case is the cornerstone of the research of this
school (Ward et al., 1996; Thorp, 1998). Research could be in developing a model for managing
benefits (Bradley, 2010; Ward and Daniel, 2006; Reiss, 2006) , in developing capabilities for
managing benefits (Ashurst and Doherty, 2003), or in determining factors that affect the
realisation process (Doherty et al., 2011).

Although the first school, the soft school, is examined using objective techniques, the second
school has not been able to verify the effectiveness of its hard approach. Roughly, all the
literature review that dealt with benefits management from the hard perspective is
interpretive research. Therefore, this research comes to fulfil this knowledge gap by
formulating and testing propositions about the validity of the hard school in realizing benefits
of the new IS projects.