Crisis Management in IT-Projects

Abstract: Crisis are extremely difficult to predict and according to Curtin, Hayman and Husein (2005) this is a problem that worsen by the trend in the 1970s and 80s where companies developed managers to be specialists. One example of this trend could be that a finance director knows only about finance, likewise for the marketing director, the technology director and operations director who all have their specialist fields. This kind of approach will lead to gaps in the management structure, since a finance director who is driven by profits and earnings per share would most probably lose sight of the bigger picture which will prevent the chances of predicting any crisis (Curtin et al., 2005). This kind of thinking began to change in the 1990s and a new approach came into vogue where managers were produced to be far more rounded than they were previously, as a generalist (Curtin et al., 2005). Our purpose is to find out how crisis emerge in projects and investigate the role of emotion in crisis management. The qualitative method is best suited to fulfil our aim since we are interested in individual’s personal experiences and personal reflections related to crisis management. The reason for us not choosing the quantitative method is that we do not wish to measure or create statistical generalizations about crisis management, it is rather to describe the essence of crisis management and issues related to crisis management, also how crisis is perceived from organizations. We therefore performed interviews with respondents that were of interest for our purpose. With all the information and knowledge gathered throughout our research we believe that when it comes to the abilities of the project managers to predict and prevent crisis, it is correct that managers have different and perhaps better education than 30 years ago but when everything comes around it is still next to impossible to completely be able to prevent crisis. We came to this conclusion after done our research and realized that even though every project manager who has been involved in any crisis can not completely prevent the same crisis to happen again.