Towards a substantive theory of project decisions in software development project-based organizations: A cross-case analysis of IT organizations from Brazil and Portugal

Although the ability to make right decisions is considered a main indicator of organizational project management professionalism, many project, program, and portfolio managers are unwilling to try to improve the quality of their decisions. This ongoing research aims to develop a substantive theory about the decision-making processes considering four elements: cognitive biases, tools and techniques, emotions and organizational factors in the context of software development project-based organizations considering the three levels of project governance: project, program, and portfolio. This paper presents the first results of the research and proposes to shed light on the susceptibility of IT project managers to cognitive biases and how they deal with them, including techniques and tools they use to minimize their negative effects. This study evaluates eight cognitive biases: anchoring bias, exposure effect, hindsight bias, halo effect, planning fallacy, sunk-cost fallacy, availability-related bias, and Parkinson´s law effect. The qualitative approach was based on semi-structured interviews with project managers from IT organizations from Brazil and Portugal. Agile practices and knowledge management activities were cited as good practices.