Complex Relationships
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This study identified several areas where relationships are complex. For example, our data
suggest that the amount of documentation has some causal relationship with the amount
of documentation success — however, this is probably not a linear relationship at all
values. At some point increasing the documentation by one unit provides less than one
unit of additional value but continues to cost one unit of time and money. At some point
additional documentation may start to erode documentation success, where success is
viewed in cost/benefit terms. It also includes multi-directional relationships. Our data
suggests that there is a relationship between the success of individual projects and the
success of the management of project development as a portfolio in the organization.
However, the direction of this relationship could go either way. The success of the
organization’s project development might simply be conceived as the accumulation of
outcomes from each project — the sum if you will. This might be influenced by overall
policies, tools, and approaches, which may differ among three groups of stakeholders,
the IT management, IT workforce, and of the larger business influences. On the other
hand, these same policies, tools, and approaches at the departmental level may influence
the success of each project. Note that policies might be applied with wisdom differentially
where appropriate to different projects, or they might be applied uniformly helping some
projects and retarding others. Note also that some types of policies, perhaps pertaining
to standardization or reuse, would have dramatic impact while others pertaining to
documentation style or change management would have less impact given different
circumstances and projects.
The nature of these relationships might be difficult to detect from the causal mapping per
se, but hints can be detected where different interview participants use terminology
differently, remark on relationships from different perspectives, point out contingencies,
or otherwise describe complexity in their responses to questions. The process of coding
statements noting causal elements and effect elements tends to blunt the observation
of these “semantic” level observations. However, in the consolidation of maps, these
tend to show up as variations among elements described by different individuals. Mining
the interesting aspects of these complex relationships requires returning to the original
text and also some interpretation, inference, and imagination on the part of the investigator.
Imagination isn’t a term normally associated with “scientific studies,” but in the
sense that the investigator recognizes that an interviewee is describing a relationship in
a particular context and that the relationships could have different aspects outside of that
context by imagining or envisioning alternate scenarios, can help bring out the richness
of the phenomena, even if it does extend beyond the literal statements made by the
participants.