An evaluation of the effectiveness of project control systems

Researchers and practitioners have been unable to identify a general set of guidelines or develop a prescriptive model for the project manager to use when selecting a project control system. The research presented here extends and integrates areas of past research on project control systems; it addresses the interactions between project control systems and the situations in which they are implemented. The results provide insights into the effectiveness of control systems which were not evident when the control system and situational conditions were treated separately. The research is based on an empirical study of 103 development projects. The results clearly show that the interactions between control systems and the situations in which they are used have very significant relationships with project success.