Subject: Information System Science
Title: The Successful Failure: How Governance Asymmetry and Sensemaking Processes Transform Technically Sound IT Projects into Organisational Failures
Abstract:
Information technology projects within large organizations are continuously in improvement, and research new underexplored areas. Projects that meet their technical requirements are labelled as failures by the managerial structures that lead them. This phenomenon, not choose but installed deeply in the structure of the team, generates a divergence between project owners and managers on the definition of the cohesion, the risk aversion, and the systematic failure to learn from experience. Existing literature has documented the limitations of the Iron triangle (Time, cost, scope) as the dominant framework for IT projects and proposed multidimensional framework instead. However, the precise mechanisms that will change the failure projects into technically successful projects. And change the governance conditions that produce this outcome. Proposition that remains insufficiently theorized. This study addresses that gap.
The central research question guiding this thesis is: How do organizations make sense of IT projects that are technically successful but perceived as managerial failures?
Based mainly on Karl Weick’s (1995) theory of organizational sensemaking, and additionally the concepts of sensegiving and sensehiding theorized by Gioia & Chittipeddi (1991) and Whitney & Daniels (2013), the study will develops a six stage conceptual framework process explaining how the complexity driven technical adaptation can be transformed into an institutionalized failure narrative through governance, asymmetry and lack of retrospective.
The study adopts an interpretive approach, thanks to a qualitative multi-case study design conducted within the IT department of the BEL group, a large international food and consumer goods company. Four IT projects were selected for this study, trying to have a full vision of the scope of the department. They were specifically chosen due to a lack of visibility, communication, or failure that happens during or after the process. Data was collected through nine semi-structured interviews with both project owners and managers. The results were analysed using an abductive analysis framework across six phases. Four major themes emerged: divergent definitions of success, structural invisibility of technical work, the role of the manager project owner relationship, and the universal absence of formal post-mortem processes.
The findings confirm the six-stage framework while introducing two significant changesets. First, the evaluative difference between project owners and managers is not entirely a divide of perception; participants assumed that multi-dimensional success was important and that governance design was the real problem. The information available to each layer determines what can be seen, shared, and remembered. Second, the study identifies the absence of post-mortem reviews as a sensemaking void: a structural organizational condition in which the technical knowledge of a project is never formally recorded, leaving a void of knowledge that emphasizes the Iron triangle deviation rather than adaptive technical achievements. The result is a selfreinforcing cycle in which governance identifies the wrong weaknesses that produce invisible complexity and perception gaps. This gap produces failure narratives that shape the governance of future projects.
The study concludes with recommendations for the institutionalization of postmortem processes, real-time complexity mechanisms, and governance orientation toward stewardship and not control.
Keywords: IT project management, Sensemaking, Iron Triangle, managerial failure, technical success, perception gap, post-mortem, organizational learning, governance, sensegiving, sensehiding, qualitative research, multi-case study