Study on factors affecting effective virtual project management in IT companies in Badulla district

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.