Qualitative comparative analysis of software development practices translated from scene to screen using the real-to-real method for inter-industry learning

Abstract

Many projectized industries, in fields as diverse as healthcare, live theater, and construction, have developed sets of specific project management practices that are consistently associated with success. These practices – assignable activities, tasks, processes, and methods – have been acquired through decades of lessons painfully learned by project teams. Well-known, existing processes allow project teams to capture and disseminate these best practices and lessons learned between projects and across organizations, allowing new teams to benefit from previous efforts. Although overall progress may at times seem fitful, these knowledge-sharing processes have allowed each industry to improve their project management methodologies over time. Unfortunately, the specificity required to make a practice actionable, assignable, and beneficial within the domain of one industry also renders it difficult to apply in another. There is no formal method, or method in widespread use, for the translation of specific project management practices across the boundaries of industry and knowledge domains. As a result, most of the benefits of these learnings - each industry's collective knowledge of best practices – are restricted to their original domain, providing little guidance to project teams in other industries. This research examines several previous attempts to apply project management practices across multiple domains and synthesizes a novel method for such inter-industry learning. The Real-to-Real method presented here begins by identifying potential barriers to project success within a target industry. Next, an industry that has developed different approaches to similar challenges is chosen as a source of inspiration. After holistically examining project management practices within that source industry, a set of evident principles is synthesized through an iterative process of inductive reasoning which explain that industry's approach to project management and these shared challenges. Using these principles as a transformative intermediary, a set of specific practices suitable for the domain of the target industry can then be identified or developed, mirroring or paralleling practices used in the source industry. These practices may lead to improved project outcomes when used in target industry projects that have characteristics similar to those found in the source industry. This method may allow for the translation and practical application of hard-won project management expertise across many projectized industries, potentially improving project outcomes in multiple fields. To provide an illustrative example of the Real-to-Real method in use, the software development industry is selected as an example target, and barriers to project success in that domain are examined. A review of the existing literature finds that the lack of simple, heuristic guidance on tailoring existing practices to better support hedonic requirements, which specify the intended emotional response of the user, may be a significant source of risk within the target industry, although the effect of hedonic requirements on project outcomes has not yet been empirically determined. With this potential source of risk in mind, the film industry is selected as a source of inspiration, as projects there share many similarities with software development projects and must routinely consider hedonic requirements. A holistic evaluation of film production project management practices suggests four evident, explanatory principles guiding that industry's approach to managing projects. This research then identifies and proposes a set of specific practices, suitable for software development projects, which also support or adhere to these same principles, thus mirroring practices used in film production projects. To support these findings, the identified software development practices are situated within existing theory, and potential mechanisms by which they may consistently lead to improved project outcomes when used in projects with high levels of hedonic requirements are discussed. A series of semi-structured interviews with experienced practitioners in the film industry are then conducted to verify an accurate understanding of film production project management practices, the synthesized explanatory principles, and the pairing of each principle to a set of related practices through. Next, a second series of interviews with experienced practitioners in the software development industry is used to verify the selection of software development practices supporting these principles. To empirically validate these findings, and to determine the effect of hedonic requirements on project outcomes, a practitioner survey is then conducted, measuring project success, use of the identified practices, and the level of hedonic requirements in 307 software development project cases in five culturally similar countries. First, the perceived criticality of hedonic requirements is compared to five measures of project success, to determine the impact of such requirements on project outcomes. Then, using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, causal recipes of the identified practices that consistently resulted in project success, across these same measures, are identified for projects with varying levels of hedonic requirements. These results validate the benefits of the identified principles and practices to projects with high levels of hedonic requirements, and provide simple, heuristic guidance to software development project teams on how to quickly and effectively tailor their management practices to better support individual projects based on the criticality of such requirements. This guidance may serve to significantly improve outcomes in software development projects with high levels of hedonic requirements. These results also help to validate the Real-to-Real method of translating management practices across industry and knowledge domains, potentially enabling additional opportunities for valuable inter-industry learning.