Failure models and failure studies - a brief note for dissertation works

From time to time, some students raise the concern whether they could study a project failure case as their final year dissertation topic. I can assure that this is very legitimate to do so. Nevertheless,  you need to do proper literature review for that. For example, there is a falure model based on systems thinking from Fortune and Peters (1995). Another  reference from these writers are Fortune and Peters (2005). Studies of failure of various kinds have been conducted over time by many others, see, for examples, Huang et al. (2003) and Naquin and Kurtzberg (2004). From my experience, students' main problems are (a) to find the relevant references, especially if they do not have access to e-library resources, and (b) to study and understand what these references are talking about.


References

1. Fortune, J. and Peters, G. (1995) Learning from failure - the systems approach, Wiley.
2. Fortune, J. and Peters, G. (2005) Information Systems: achieving success by avoiding failure, Wiley.
3. Huang, J., Makoju, E., Newell, S., and Galliers, R.D. (2003) "Opportunities to learn from 'failure' with electronic commerce: a case study of electronic banking", Journal of Information Technology 18, 17-26.
4. Naquin, C.E. and Kurtzberg, T.R. (2004) "Human reactions to technological failure: How accidents rooted in technology vs human error influence judgments of organizational accountability", Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 93, 129-141.