Evaluation of Motivating and Requiring Factors for Milestones in IT Projects

Businesses are having to carry out Information technology (IT) projects of increasing complexity due to several reasons including the advances in information technology and the implementation challenges it brings. Effective project management is key to achieving project success and, in this space, lies the opportunity to use tools for supporting the process. One of such tools are milestones; A milestone is a scheduled event of zero-time duration that marks the completion of one or more important tasks. This research studies the factors influencing the creation of milestones in IT projects and it does so through literature review, focus group, and interpretive structural modelling. Twelve factors were considered for the interpretive structural model and the results show that several factors can influence the creation of milestones in IT projects. Most important it seems are factors arising from internal and external stakeholders. Using more evidence to support inferences about the factor influences and validating the model with wide participation from practitioners are suggested as future work. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.