introducing a methodology of strategy selection in IT project management

The strategic approach to project management is a new attitude that has attracted the attention of business academics in the last decade. Having a strategic approach in the field of IT projects forces managers in the first step of project management to choose the appropriate strategy by considering the various factors that influence the strategy selection. Rational and adaptive approaches are two predominant strategies in project management that require different tools, resources, and procedures. Despite the increasing growth of investment in IT projects and the dependence of organizations on such technologies, there are still few studies that assist IT managers to select the appropriate strategy for such projects. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to develop an appropriate approach for selecting a strategy in the management of IT projects. To achieve this goal, in the first step, after reviewing the comprehensive literature in the related field and in order to identify the factors influencing the strategy selection of the IT project management, the focus group has been used. In the second step, for validating the extracted factors, and in the third step, in order to weigh each of the factors in selecting the two dominant rational and adaptive approaches, the survey method was used for reviewing experts’ viewpoints. In the proposed methodology, factors that influence the strategy selection in IT projects are process factors, human factors, system-related factors, and context factors. The final strategy for managing IT projects is a spectrum of rational strategy and adaptive strategy.