Abstract:
Virtual software organizations and virtual project management are emerging
concepts. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the IT industry was influenced by
the work-from-home strategy which has already been initiated but earlier it
was not fully virtual. This study focuses on IT companies in Uva Province, Sri
Lanka. The study investigates the current project management practices,
challenges in virtual project management and factors affecting effective
virtual project management and it evaluates the relationship between the
factors and effective project management. The evaluation inspires to improve
the virtual project management practices in virtual software organizations.
Work in different time zones, communication methods, monitoring
mechanisms, and flexibility of work environment have been identified as the
most critical challenging factors that influence effective virtual project
management through literature review. Hypotheses were created considering
the above factors and correlation analysis was used to present the relationship
between each factor and effective virtual project management. The
quantitative approach and purposive sampling method have been selected to
collect data through an online questionnaire. The population of this study is
145 and it has administrated to a sample size of 105 according to Krejcie and
Morgan tables. The responses are subjected to appropriate statistical
procedures for validating the hypothesis and identifying specific weak areas
for improvement. According to the study, monitoring mechanisms (0.713) and
communication methods (0.656) have a significant influence on effective
virtual project management while different time zone and flexible work
environments have a moderate impact.
