The Effect Of Project Management Standard On IT Outsourcing Client Satisfaction

Information Technology Outsourcing(ITO)has world widely been an increasingly important phenomenon in recent times.Outsourcing is now experiencing tremendous growth across a number of developing countries,including Iran,due to the rapid advances in information technology and the increasing pool of educated workers.Although ITO enjoys popularity and growth,the unsatisfied clients have been widely reported.ITO scholars have investigated the determinants of ITO client satisfaction from various views.Most recent studies focus on one-side perspective(the client-side or the vendor side)and big countries,such as the USA,Japan,China,and India,while we have limited studies,integrating both client and vendors,and more importantly focusing on small countries(like Iran),thus,studying the improvement of client satisfaction in Iran as a small and developing country from both client and vendor sides should be paid in more attention.In a rapidly changing business and technological environment,it is important to develop and deploy new systems,which can present inflow knowledge and a set of interrelated or interacting activities to constitute a mechanism of coordination and presents regulations of technical standards or specifications.In ITO,even lots of vendors have already implemented project management standards(PMS),because of its relevance and potential benefits,but in ITO project management,they have received little research attention with few exceptions,and extant outsourcing studies have no clear understanding of the role of project management standard.To fill the gap,this study intends to explore how the vendor's implementation of PMS can affect ITO client satisfaction,along with the ITO relationship.Indeed the literature has indicated the importance of ITO relationship for client satisfaction by numerous investigations.Notwithstanding its significance effect,an egregious percentage of outsourcing deals are still considered as failures with good relationships.Therefore,we are interested in exploring whether and how PMS is effective to improve ITO client satisfaction through an interplay effect with the relationship.Firstly,developing a mediated moderation model,this dissertation explores the underlying mechanism through which the implementation of the vendor's external standard affects ITO client satisfaction jointly with partnership quality and whether service quality mediates their joint effect on client satisfaction.Conducting a survey of 118 project managers in nine Iranian client firms,the model and hypotheses are empirically tested by the partial least squares method.Our results suggest that firms benefit more in terms of IT costs reduction when they have a higher level of complementary investment in external standard,especially through an interplay effect with internal relational aspect.Firms can make business processes more amenable to outsourcing and facilitate monitoring of vendor performance and effective coordination with vendors.More interestingly,we found that this interactive effect is fully mediated by service quality,which in turn directly increases IT client satisfaction.This study adds some new knowledge and provides new views to study ITO client satisfaction by addressing the importance of PMS implementation.This work,further,enhances our understanding in terms of the underlying pathway through which PMS jointly affects client satisfaction with partnership quality and service quality.With the effort of explicitly explaining the complex mechanisms,this study helps IT outsourcing managers proactively escort outsourcing activities and projects.Secondly,this dissertation explores how PMS and relationship management capability affect ITO project client satisfaction,and whether client control and vendor capability risk moderate these effects(developing a moderation model).The proposed model and hypotheses have been tested with paired wise empirical quantitative data collected from 260 ITO projects.The results show,both PMS and relationship management capability positively influence client satisfaction.Furthermore,client control has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between PMS and client satisfaction,while vendor capability risk positively moderates the effect of relationship management capability on client satisfaction.These findings shed light on the complex mechanisms underlying project standardization application and how it should be proactively utilized along with other relevant variables,thus providing important theoretical and practical implications regarding improving ITO client satisfaction.Asa base on both academic and practical perspective,the implementation of PMS is very useful for client satisfaction,we observed those perspectives to demonstrate that the ITO projects can be competitive in the market,when PMS incorporate with the ITO processes and procedures.