Question Design

The researcher was aware that question design was an important success factor for the thesis and so he followed the techniques suggested by acknowledged research methods experts, such as Jonker and Pennink (2010), Ritchie and Lewis (2010), Creswell (2008) and Saunders et al. (2009).

Every attempt was made to frame questions so that they did not contain double meanings or lead the participant to a particular response; these questions were tested by interviewing academic peers and amended appropriately. This process also improved the validity of the thesis. Prior to designing the questions the researcher developed a document that summarised his basic understanding of the implementation so that he could highlight the specific issues that were of interest to solving the research problem. Questions were also informed by the content of the literature reviews of Chapters Two and Three.

The preparation and conducting questions and interview settings are based on two findings from the literature review namely 1) Implementation phases; and 2) Critical success factors.

4.5.3.1 Implementation phases

Prior research suggests a number of implementation phases for implementing ERP. The total number of the phases varies between three and six (See section 2.2.1). The targeted model this thesis aims to achieve has two characteristics; first, it is a holistic in nature; second, ERP sponsors are the primary users of the model. Due to the holistic nature and the fact that ERP sponsors are top executives who have challenging priorities, their dedication to ERP in terms of investment of time should be kept to the minimum.

For those reasons, an approach with three implementation phases has been chosen to structure the data collection and analysis. The first stage refers to period from planning stage until the starting of the implementation project; the second stage covers the implementation stage until the go-live. The post implementation and continuous improvements are covered by the third stage which starts from the go-live point.

This approach is supported by the work of Parr and Shanks (2000), which includes only three phases of planning, project and enhancement, and that of Shao et al. (2009) that has primary adoption, secondary adoption and assimilation.

4.5.3.2 Critical Success Factors (CSFs)

Prior research is rich in establishing critical factors that can lead ERP to successful implementation. More recent studies have provided classification of such factors based on the number of studies that support each factor. Other efforts also classified those factors based on the nature of its effect on the implementation. The literature review chapter has included a number of those studies that review the most critical factors affecting ERP implementation among the various CSFs.

The literature review chapter presents three CSF(s) reviews (Table 2.2) by Finney and Corbett (2007), (Table 2.3) by Momoh et al. (2010), (Table 2.4) Adapted from Pan et al. (2011) and (Table 2.5) by Kapp et al (2001).

The factors obtained from these studies have been used as a starting point for setting agendas for the unstructured interview questions.

4.5.3.3 Question types and samples

Open Questions

Open questions used in semi-structured interviews aimed to gather facts, views and feelings and represented the majority of questions. The six key types: who, why, where, when, how and what were employed to encourage the recipient to be as open as possible. Table 4.2 include examples from each element.

Table 4.2 Samples of the six key questions: who, why, where, when, how, what’ were No Type Example

1 Who Who has promoted the notion of implementing ERP in the organisation?

2 Why Why it took the organisation such long time to realise that it has a serious implementation problem in this specific area?

3 Where From where finance department adopted this business practice that they claim it is the best practice?

4 When When the implementor completed the configuration of the manufacturing modules? 5 How How did the new HR director successfully manage to tune HR modules

implementation from failure to success while his former peer failed to do this in two years?

6 What What are the primary reasons that led the organisation to choose implementing planning module?

The researcher did not interrupt and actively listened to the participant’s answer. An additional tactic used in questioning was to ask the interviewee’s opinion about the degree to which an intervention had been successful as well as to ask him/her to describe or explain a certain scenario, in order to elicit substantial detail on an issue (Jonker and Pennink, 2010, Ritchie and Lewis, 2010).

Closed Questions

Closed questions were used, as required, to check understanding of the points made by the participants, or after summarising what the researcher had recorded as the main points (Ritchie and Lewis, 2010; Saunders et al. 2009). Examples of this type of questions are provided in table 4.3.

Table 4.3 Samples of closed questions used in the interviews

No Example

1 Can we conclude that the only justification for deciding to implement ERP that your primary competitor announced his initiative in implementing ERP?

2 Do you main that because there were no pressure on the project manager to bring the project closer stage it kept dragging all these months?

3 Can I understand from this that finance has no bench mark reference that justify adopting this business practice?

4 Would it be fair to say that such revolution in HR behaviour towards ERP implementation is simply because the new director has much more experience in dealing with information systems in comparisons to the former HR director?