Communication, collaboration, and teamwork are critical factors for the successful completion of information systems projects. Communication ensures the right information is exchanged between project stakeholders in a timely manner. Collaboration involves sharing expertise and working towards common goals, while minimizing risks. Teamwork refers to groups of people with diverse skills working together towards a shared objective. When communication, collaboration and teamwork are implemented effectively, projects are more likely to be completed within budget and schedule, and deliver high quality results.

1. COMMUNICATION, COLLABORATION, AND TEAMWORK ARE
INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT FOR THE SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF
INFORMATION SYSTEMS PROJECTS
Hirak Lal Kocharee
Student ID- W20066024
MSc Global Financial Information Systems
Waterford Institute of Technology, Co. Waterford, Ireland
(E-mail: hirak.kocharee@gmail.com)
ABSTRACT
Information system projects are critical for success of every business in the current competitive business environment. Thus
information system projects are undertaken to build robust information system to thrive in the market. Each project has got
dedicated resources responsible for delivering particular deliverables and assigned to a team. Each team has members who are
experts in their domain but they work in isolation without communication, collaboration and teamwork which leads to project
failures. The author attempts to underline the importance of communication, collaboration, and teamwork for the successful
completion of information system projects.
Keywords: Communication, Collaboration, Teamwork, Project Management, Costs, Quality, Time, Systems
1. INTRODUCTION
In today’s era everyone has a mobile phone but not just a
mobile phone, it is the smart companion. People can keep
track of everything as information can be accessed from
around the world and at anytime, as barriers of distance have
disappeared and information can be accessed faster and
faster and with more reliability. Technological advancement
has made life easy and has helped to increase human comfort
at home and at work. Our world and our society are
constantly changing. Products and services are becoming
more and more complex and sophisticated. New
technologies are becoming part of our daily life.
Data is part of everyday life. Each day huge chunks of data
are produced from many sources, be it an individual using an
ecommerce website for online shopping or a customer using
online banking for any kind of transactions. This data is very
important in itself. It gives lots of information to an
individual and to the corporate world for decision making.
The question that arises here is how can data be stored,
churned and converted into information. The answer is by
building a robust Information System. Information System
can be defined as:
“Interrelated components working together to collect,
process, store, and disseminate information to support
decision making, coordination, control, analysis, and
visualization in an organization”(Kenneth and Jane, 2012).
“Information is power”. This is often heard by everyone. In
fact, power depends on how and where the information is
used and when it is used at any given point of time. For
example, if there is an urgent need to buy a 5th
edition book
of Information System project management, but it is not
available in a book shop. In this case Ecommerce comes
quite handy. An individual can order books from any
publisher via the medium of the internet at any given point
of time. Another example, a business had reduced sales in a
particular month. The management decides to check the
bottleneck issue. This information can be retrieved only
when an Information retrieval system is in place.
Building or developing an Information system is a complex
process. It can take time: from a few weeks to several
months depending on the complexity of the project. Almost
all the project is aimed to be completed in low budget, short
time period and with high quality. This objective cannot me

2. met if right people are not included in the project. According
to Rezaian (2011) “a project is an organization of people
dedicated to the deployment of a set of resources for a
specific purpose or objective”. Each person in a project is
assigned work depending on their experience and capability.
If all of them work in isolation without coordination, the
project time will overshoot, the budget required would
increase and this would lead to project failure. The strategy
to this is to create an environment wherein the people
involved in a project work in collaboration with each other,
with effective communication and with great teamwork. A
successful information system project depends on three
factors:
a) Communication:
It is the process of exchanging information between
two or more parties.
b) Collaboration
Working with each other to complete a task and
achieve a goal.
c) Teamwork
Each team performing different tasks in a project is
known as teamwork. For example, Business
Analyst Team, Testing Team or Development team
to name a few.
These factors can be illustrated by below diagram (Figure 1).
Figure 1
Each of the above factors has its own importance for a
successful information system project.
2. COMMUNICATION FOR SUCCESSFUL
COMPLETION OF INFORMATION SYSTEM
PROJECT
Communication is the exchange of the correct information
between the sender and the receiver. In every project,
effective communication forms the medium for the exchange
of right information. It is the most important way to
implement a successful project. A project consists of many
stakeholders and each stakeholder requires information
throughout the project to complete their tasks. Each project
can be broken down into work break down structure. The
basic idea of work breakdown structure is to break the work
and create subsets of tasks. For each work breakdown
structure there are people involved with corresponding tasks.
It is mentioned in the Project Communication Handbook that
for each WBS element, there are:
a) Suppliers who provide the input needed for the
WBS element
b) Task managers who are responsible for delivering
the WBS element
c) Customers who receive the products of the WBS
element
Figure Source: Project communication handbook (2nd
Edition), (2007), Office of Project Management Process
Improvement
For each WBS, a supplier has to communicate with the task
manager and the task manager has to communicate with both
the supplier and the customer. To elaborate, let’s look into
the phase between requirement specification and
development in a software development life cycle. Suppose
there is a project of building a complaint management
system. The business analysts play the role of suppliers of
the specifications that have to communicate with the
development team. They act as a conduit between business
users and the developer. The development team in turn plays
the role of customer. Business analysts have to create a
document with all the specifications and communicate the
correct specifications to the developers for the development
of the product before making it ready for testing phase i.e.
for the next customer. The business analyst should clearly
communicate what he wants from the developer and when he
wants it to be completed and in turn developer needs to
know the complete specifications to be developed.
Communication can be done both in writing and verbally.
For every project there should be a clear plan for
communication as there can be chances of having different
teams working in different time zones too. It is difficult to
have short but regular meetings between the teams.
2.1 Importance of communication
Effective communication has great importance on the
success of every information system project. For every
information system project, a clear and concise
communication plan should be created to meet the
expectations of all the stakeholders involved. One factor that
has a direct impact on project failure is the inefficient and
insufficient communication. It is often seen that the project
team and other stakeholders are left wondering on whether
they get the right information in right time or not. We all

3. know that blood has to be circulated throughout the body to
keep the organs functioning. Likewise communication is the
blood of information system projects. It has to be effectively
and evenly circulated or distributed in order for the smooth
completion of project without failure. Typically, if the scope
of the project, time, budget and task is impacted by
something then it has to be escalated to senior management
through effective communication channels (Culo,
Skendrovic, 2010). Communication in in-house projects or
co located projects is easy but with the advancement of
technology and the need of new technologies the project
teams might have to work virtually from different location
having different time zones. A virtual team may not have
team members physically in the same location. Companies
have always been in pursuit of cost optimization because of
which they tend to hire resources beyond the local labor
market regardless of the location and use of advance
technologies for information system projects. As the team
members are located in various locations, there should be a
good communication plan.
2.2 Communication methods in an Information System
Project
For a successful information system project, a clear and
concise communication plan has to be created. This plan acts
like a framework for every communication that will take
place during the entire project phase. An effective
communication plan gives a clear view about the points
given below:
a) Who is the receiver of the information
b) Stages at which information has to be circulated
c) Who is the sender of the information
d) Information delivery method
Once the communication plan is created based on the
guidelines and expectation of the information system project,
the plan can be executed. Communicating, reporting and
tracking of each stage of a project can be done by the below
information distribution channel.
a) Email: Can be used for sharing files and mailing
text between teams.
b) Instant messaging: This is the most common form
of communication method between teams to
communicate in real-time.
c) Project management system: The stakeholders can
use it to track which stage the project is currently
in.
d) Face to Face: The team can schedule daily, weekly
or monthly meetings for communication and
sharing the deliverables and discuss the issues of
the project.
e) Teleconferencing/videoconferencing: This is the
best medium for communication between virtual
teams.
3. COLLABORATION FOR SUCCESSFUL
COMPLETION OF INFORMATION SYSTEM
PROJECT
Collaboration is the process of achieving a goal by
collaborative actions of different persons. It consists of
sharing and working on a common goal and direction. The
individuals involved in collaboration process share their
expertise to minimize the risk and achieve the goal without
failure. The responsibilities, failures and achievements are
shared among the collaborators. Collaboration requires high
commitment and trust within the collaborators.
Today every business is affected by challenges to remain
competitive in business ecosystem. There is a need to change
fast with demanding requirements and implement the latest
technologies. This technology renders flexibility to the
business to become fast respondents to the demands. This in
turn leads to building new information systems in a dynamic
business ecosystem. In every information system project,
there is a limitation of time, budget constraints and
requirement of high quality deliverables. A project consists
of a series of deliverables which is the result of preceding
activities. These activities can be termed as the components
of a project plan. Each component is worked upon by the
team responsible for it and each team member has the
expertise on the assigned task. For example a business
analyst in a project helps in gathering requirement and
designing, and a developer has the expertise of development.
Thus a project consists of a plan for deliverables and teams
required to execute these deliverables. An important aspect
of project plan is collaboration between teams and without
this there can be chances of budget and time overshooting
and also there can be risk of creating products with many
defects.
It has always been perceived that collaboration was only
related to document sharing. In the current era, collaboration
comprises of communication and a relationship between the
project team and stakeholders, coordinating in different tasks
to achieve a common goal and participating in the decision
making process (Daoudi, 2012). As businesses are going
global, the information system project teams are getting
dispersed. There is a need of collaboration for a successful
information system project.
3.1 Importance of collaboration
Collaboration in information system project is very
important because of:
a) Dispersed team: Traditionally Information system
project teams were working together on the same
site. But with globalization and requirement of low
cost labor to reduce cost, organizations tend to hire
resources beyond the local labor market. Thus in
many information system projects, teams have to
work together in a coordinated way. For example,
the business analyst team might work from the

4. client location but the development team might
work from the organization itself. Thus there is a
need of collaboration between the teams.
b) Organized hierarchy: Every information system
project comprises of different teams and different
hierarchy. Each team is responsible for completing
the task to produce a deliverable in the project. If
the team works in isolation, there can be chances of
confusion leading to project failure. Each hierarchy
in a team should create a process to collaborate with
other teams.
c) Information sharing: Collaboration in any
information system project leads to sharing of
information. Each team member is an expert in their
field. Thus team members need to collaborate with
each other in order to share information and
accomplish the goal.
To get a clear view of the above points, let’s look into an
example. An organization has to build a CRM system for a
client. To name a few, there will be a team of business
analyst, developer and tester. As business analyst acts as a
conduit between the business users and developer they might
work from the client site and have to repeatedly interact with
the client and the developers. Post the requirement gathering
and documentation, the deliverable is passed to the
developer for the development. There is always a chance that
the developer might think and develop the product with a
different understanding of the requirement or there might be
a misinterpretation from the business analyst. Thus there is a
need of collaboration for getting the right development to be
done and this can be achieved only when there is
coordination between the business analyst and the developer.
Same is the case between the developer and a tester. If the
tester finds a defect while testing then the issue needs to be
resolved by the developer in a timely manner to release a
defect free information system.
4. TEAMWORK
Teamwork can be defined as tasks performed by a group of
people with collaborative efforts to achieve a common goal.
Thus a team in teamwork should have diverse individuals, a
common goal, a sense of community, knowledge-sharing,
and concerted effort characteristics (Edmondson, 2012).
Information system project success can be quantified by the
cost, quality and time but this is achievable only when teams
work in a collaborative effort. Thus teamwork can be said to
be one of the critical success factors of an information
system project. Each team in a project has different members
having different skills like problem solving, communication,
interpersonal skills, social skills and time management skills
(Tarricone and Luca, 2002). Most of the employers consider
teamwork as another skill for the success of projects. This is
because individuals working in isolation are not as
productive as individuals working in a team. Thus team
members should be able to work in collaboration with each
other rather than competing against each other for the same
goal.
Benefits of teamwork in an Information system project:
1) Every individual aims for the same goal and
contributes to its success.
2) There are less chances of failure if team members
work in collaboration with each other rather than
working in isolation.
3) Brings in creativeness to the project.
4) Team members motivate each other to complete the
tasks.
5) Task conflicts are solved faster leading to an
improvement in performance.
6) There can be fewer chances of deadlines not being
met.
7) Brings in unity in diversity thus leading to
knowledge sharing.
Hoegl and Gemuenden (2001) in their research said that
teamwork quality has 6 facets; communication, coordination,
balance of member contributions, mutual support, effort and
cohesion. Understanding of these six facets is required for a
successful information system project. Information system
projects consist of many stages and each stage has a
deliverable. There needs to be clear understanding of each
deliverable i.e. what it is, how it can be achieved and how
much time is required to deliver the deliverable. All of this
needs to be clear and communicated to each team
responsible to each deliverable. There should be continuous
communication throughout the project. Communication
leads to coordination of tasks. Teams should not work in
isolation as isolation leads to confusion in tasks to be
completed. Thus there has to be coordination between the
teams involved in an information system project. Each team
has to have common understanding of the current status of
the individual contributions (Hoegl and Gemuenden, 2001).
Every team has members who are experts in their domain
thus the team member should be able to contribute to the
task they are responsible for. Thus contribution forms a basis
for the teamwork. Apart from contribution, team members
should support each other as support leads to motivation in
completing the task. Mutual support has a positive effect on
quality teamwork. Quality of teamwork is also affected by
the efforts taken by each team member. Each team member
in an information system project should understand how
much effort needs to be given to complete the task and
achieve the goal defined for the project. An important aspect
of the quality of teamwork can also be seen in terms of
cohesion of team members i.e. degree to which a team
member has a relation with other members of a team.
5. CONCLUSIONS

5. So the reasons lead us to think that successful completion of
information system project depends on communication,
collaboration and teamwork. There should be continuous
communication throughout the project between each team,
each team member should work in collaboration to each
other and each working team should complete the task as
teamwork. Communication helps in exchange of information
between the team members. The individuals involved in
collaboration process share their expertise to minimize the
risk and achieve the goal without failure. Teamwork leads to
common understanding of the goal and improves the
communication, coordination, balance of member
contributions, mutual support, effort and cohesion.
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