Analysis of project management reports of 49 system integration projects

This paper describes the tasks which the project managers performed when specification changes were requested by the customers have been extracted from the reports of 49 system integration projects by means of text mining technology. The results of the analysis agree with an empirical rule of project managers who have experience in many system development projects. The considerable efforts which the project managers (PM) expend in defining the specifications, accounting for additional costs in developing the system, getting a temporary purchase order from the customer, proposing a feasible delivery date to a customer and arriving at an agreement with a customer are quantified. The relationship between these efforts and the price of the system, and the number of specification changes is discussed.