Managing Projects More Successful: Evaluation of a Concept for Implementing Critical Success Factors in Practice

One of today's challenges for manufacturing companies is the compliance of their products with increased new technological and regulatory requirements from official bodies, such as the European Commission. For the construction equipment industry, these regulations particularly entail the development of emission free machines alongside corresponding software components, for instance a battery management system. Since manufacturers in this industry can still be considered as traditional in their product offer, as compared to e.g. the automotive industry, expertise in these fields of product development must be further established. As the interdependence of, e.g., hardware and software projects is one of the drivers of project complexity, the purpose of this study is to investigate a concept for an improved management of this type of projects. To this end, the implementation of critical success factors for project management was conceptualized, partially employed, and empirically assessed. By adapting the Design Research Methodology framework, a literature review, a series of interviews, online workshops, and a survey were conducted in cooperation with a construction equipment manufacturer. The results show that the CSF concept is perceived to be rather easy to use and rather useful. This study provides a proposal and first-time empirical assessment of guidelines for applying the CSF concept in project management.