Project Team Rewards
Verification of the Results / Case Studies Analysis
61
final deadline and the product has the agreed quality and functionality. The quality is
measured by customer satisfaction surveys and calls to the customer support lines. Second,
recognition in form of celebrations is provided if the team hit a major milestone (usually
four or five during a project). This practice again correlates with the thesis’ findings. Since
the projects’ duration is rather short, only one incentive should be provided at the project’s
end. Recognition should be given during the project several times. Also linking the
rewards to performance (time and quality) seems to be fine since the uniqueness of the
projects is rather low. The project teams mostly develop new versions of software instead
of completely
new products. In this case, estimates probably can be made with an
acceptable accuracy, which supports the use of performance rewards.
Kunda & Brooks (2000) describe a project where programmers had to develop a new
software and were paid by output/results, namely by lines of code. As a result,
programmers wrote unnecessarily complex and big programs with low quality because
they focused only on the lines of code. As described in 5.3.1. Impact of Uniqueness /
Outcome and
Process Clarity
(p. 50), result based rewards are seldom a good idea in
project work because of the project’s uniqueness. The case supports this statement; finally,
the project failed.
Singh & Shoura (2006) analysed a change project in an engineering company. For this
project it was important that several engineers worked together that had never worked
together before. In addition, they were individualists, not used to teamwork. In
this
situation, the thesis
findings would suggest individual rewards
to increase the engineers’
motivation and accept the change. Actually, no rewards at all were provided to the
engineers and the project became a failure. The case studies authors likewise
recommended the use of incentives to support the change process (Singh & Shoura 2006).
Overall, the case studies fit well with the thesis’
findings and provide first evidence.
The different cases indicate that one of the thesis’
main findings is true: depending on the
project characteristics, a successful reward system will
differ. Furthermore, the cases
provide initial evidence for the validity of the results from 5.3
Project Characteristics’
Impact on
the Reward
Answers
(p. 50). However, not for all of the thesis’
findings,
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