Project Dimension Base Cases

Mirroring the approach taken for the success and failure association analyses, a base case was created for each of the four project dimensions to assess the validity of the approach. For project managers with and without LSE, the association between the key words indicating the project dimension and "Tool" was calculated.

In Figure 7-6, the base care for communication management is shown. The words being tested in this dimension for common understanding, of all participants, in relation to the term “tool” are: “communication,” “communicate” and “feedback”. “Communication” and “communicate” are both very strongly associated with the word “tool.” “Communication” is clearly a tool that project managers use and one discussed by all of the project managers in their interviews. “Feedback” is slightly less, but still strongly associated with the word “tool.” This is also an intuitive result as “feedback” is a subset of “Communication” and was not explicitly named as a tool in the interview questions.

Figure 7-6 Communication Association Base Case

The association strength being highly comparable between the interviewees with and without LSE gives evidence the results obtained in the project dimension of communication management are reliable. There is less than 0.1 cosine similarity difference between the project managers possessing LSE and the project managers not possessing LSE regarding the association of each

ANALYSIS of SELECTED WORD PAIRS in the INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS

186 of the terms “communication,” “communicate,” “feedback” with the term “tool” found in the text analysis of their processed interview transcripts. (Figure 7-6).

Figure 7-7 Requirements Gathering Association Base Case

In the dimension of requirements gathering, the words in the interview texts being tested for common understanding in relation to the word “tool” are: ‘requirements” and “gathering”. Both "requirements" and “gathering" are strongly associated with the word “tool,” with less than 0.1 cosine similarity difference between the differences between the two groups. (Figure 7-7).

Many participants pointed out the importance of tools to effectively manage this project dimension. Tools are needed to determine if requirements are gathered correctly and accurately. These comments emphasise the importance of tools in the requirements gathering dimension for both project managers with and without LSE.

ANALYSIS of SELECTED WORD PAIRS in the INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS

187 Figure 7-8 Risk Management Association Base Case

For the dimension of risk management, the terms tested for association with “tool” are “risk” and “management”. Both "risk" and "management" are strongly associated with the word “tool,” with less than 0.1 cosine similarity difference between the calculated association found in the text data from the interviews of the groups of the project managers possessing LSE and those not possessing LSE. (Figure 7-8).

In the qualitative analysis of the interview transcripts, all participants were concerned with risk management and the challenges this dimension poses to the project manager. Risks are often unknown even when attempts are made to anticipate problems, risk identification, anticipation and mitigation are high priorities in any project. So, a variety of tools are needed; it would be very difficult to guide this dimension of a project without predefined and pretested tools; though many effective tools exist, better and additional tools are still needed. Many tools were named specifically in the interviews. it is not unexpected that the word2vec algorithm would find a strong word association between "risk" and “tool,” and "management" and “tool” in the text analysis of both groups of participants.

ANALYSIS of SELECTED WORD PAIRS in the INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS

188 Figure 7-9 Transition Support Association Base Case

Figure 7-9 shows the word association tests for the dimension of project support transition. The words tested for association with “tool” are “transition” and “support”. Both "transition" and "support" are strongly associated with the word “tool,” with less than 0.1 cosine similarity difference between the project managers possessing LSE and those not possessing LSE in their understanding of “transition” and “support” and “tool”.

The interviewees talked about various types of approaches, tools and interventions that assist in this dimension of project management: using a support transition checklist for details, transition to support questionnaire, documentation and implementation of plans, implementation diagrams, preparation of a training plan for the client support team, to name a few. The participants’ interview comments lend support to the finding of strong association between “support” and tools, and “transition” and “tools” in the analysis of text data from the interviews of IT project managers possessing LSE and the managers not possessing LSE.

The results in all the above cases are in line with expectations; the word2vec algorithm perceived a strong association between each of the words selected to represent each project dimensions with the word "tool" and this association only minimally differs between project managers with and without LSE. These results provide evidence that the approach is valid and can be trusted. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis of the full interview transcripts with complete narratives and complete context shows that these project managers, in real life IT

ANALYSIS of SELECTED WORD PAIRS in the INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS

189 project management, view all four of the dimensions of the study as key dimensions of IT projects and that they are all concerned with tools in every dimension being available, effective and easy to use. The participants talked about existing tools, but they also talked about the need for more and better tools, frameworks of tools and training to use tools. The importance of tools cannot be overstated; as one participant said, “tools, tools, tools.” (See Chapter Four for more details of the qualitative analysis of the interview transcripts.)

Now that the base case associations for the words of interest have been tested and found to be approximately the same in the text analyses of both the group of participants with LSE and the group without, the results obtained with the model used are shown in Section 7.7.