Can Project Team Members’ Willingness to Disclose Past Performance During Procurement Improve Organizational Business Process Success?

Summary

Strang and Vajjhala (2025) tested whether project team members’ willingness to disclose past performance evaluations during procurement improves project success, applying correlation, conditioned correlation, t-tests and ordinary least squares regression to Fintech project data in a post-positivist design. After controlling for budget, end-user community size and certification, willingness to share past performance evaluations significantly improved project success, raising the explained variance in project success from 9.6% to 18.8%. The findings are reported for Fintech projects, and generalization to other project types requires further testing.

Practical implication. Project sponsors and procurement teams can use team members’ willingness to share past performance evaluations as a practical, low-cost signal when staffing Fintech projects.

The Problem

Projects still fail roughly half the time, and established predictors such as budget, end-user community size and certification explain little of the difference between success and failure.

The Methodology

Post-positivist quantitative hypothesis testing on Fintech project data: correlation, conditioned correlation, t-tests and ordinary least squares regression with budget, end-user community size and certification as controls.

The Core Finding

Team members’ willingness to disclose their past performance evaluations during procurement significantly improved project success after controlling for budget, end-user community size and certification, roughly doubling the explained variance in project success from 9.6% to 18.8%.

The Citation

Strang, K. D., & Vajjhala, N. R. (2025). Can Project Team Members’ Willingness to Disclose Past Performance During Procurement Improve Organizational Business Process Success? Information, 16(11), Article 955. https://doi.org/10.3390/info16110955 Copy APA

The summary, key findings, methods, implications and relevance notes on this page are this website’s own description of the paper, written from the published abstract and text. The official abstract and citation details are given further down.

The study in detail

What question does this paper answer?

Does a project team member’s willingness to disclose past performance evaluations during procurement improve team allocation and business process success — beyond established predictors such as budget, end-user community size, and certification?

What did the study find, in detail?

Yes. After controlling for budget, end-user community size, and certification, team members’ willingness to share their past performance evaluations significantly improved project success, raising the explained variance in project success from 9.6% to 18.8%.

Why does it matter?

Projects still fail roughly half the time. The results suggest that transparency factors — specifically, willingness to share past performance — can outweigh traditional resource-allocation variables in predicting Fintech project outcomes, giving project sponsors and procurement teams a practical, low-cost signal to use when staffing projects.

This study is part of the evidence overview What predicts IT project failure and success? Evidence on project managers, bias and team transparency from machine learning and experiments

Methods and data

Definitions and key terms

Past performance disclosure

A team member voluntarily sharing evaluations of their performance on earlier projects when being considered for a new project team. — as used in Strang & Vajjhala (2025)

Explained variance (R²)

The share of the variation in an outcome — here, project success — that a regression model accounts for. — as used in Strang & Vajjhala (2025)

All key terms across the publications →

Abstract

Projects continue to fail approximately half the time, both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. While prior studies highlight the influence of project leadership and individual competencies, little is known about whether team members’ willingness to disclose past performance can improve team allocation decisions and enhance business process success. However, we do not know if team members’ willingness to disclose their past performance may improve teamwork allocation in projects, thereby increasing business process success while reducing the likelihood of the project failing. We applied a rigorous post-positivist research design using correlation, conditioned correlation, t-tests, and ordinary least squares (OLS) linear regression to test the hypotheses. Controlling established predictors including budget, end user community size, and certification, we found that team members’ willingness to share their past performance evaluations significantly improved project success, increasing explained variance from 9.6% to 18.8%. The results indicate that transparency factors—specifically, willingness to share past performance—outweigh traditional resource allocation variables in predicting Fintech project outcomes, explaining an additional 19% of the variance in project success.

Abstract as published in Information under a Creative Commons licence.

Limitations and open questions

• Findings are reported for Fintech projects; generalization to other project types requires further testing.

Open questions

• Would willingness to disclose past performance, measured before team selection in longitudinal or quasi-experimental designs, still predict success across industries and privacy regimes such as GDPR?

Open questions from the evidence overview Project management and project success.

Practical implications

• Project sponsors and procurement teams can treat willingness to share past performance as a low-cost staffing signal, because the results suggest transparency factors can outweigh traditional resource-allocation variables in predicting Fintech project outcomes.
• For researchers modelling project success with regression and control variables, adding willingness to disclose past performance to budget, end-user community size and certification increased the explained variance in project success from 9.6% to 18.8%.
• For project sponsors and procurement teams staffing other types of project, generalization requires further testing, because the findings are reported for Fintech projects.

Drawn from Strang & Vajjhala (2025), Information, 16(11), Article 955.

When this research may be relevant

This article may be relevant to literature on project success predictors, team selection and procurement practices, transparency and past-performance disclosure in project staffing, and Fintech or financial software project management. It is useful for researchers modelling project success with regression and control variables.

Research topics addressed: project success; project failure; project team selection; procurement; past performance disclosure; transparency; Fintech projects; business process success; OLS regression; project management

How to cite

APA 7

Strang, K. D., & Vajjhala, N. R. (2025). Can Project Team Members’ Willingness to Disclose Past Performance During Procurement Improve Organizational Business Process Success? Information, 16(11), Article 955. https://doi.org/10.3390/info16110955Copy APA citation

MLA 9

Strang, Kenneth David, and Narasimha Rao Vajjhala. “Can Project Team Members’ Willingness to Disclose Past Performance During Procurement Improve Organizational Business Process Success?” Information, vol. 16, no. 11, 2025, article 955. https://doi.org/10.3390/info16110955.Copy MLA citation

IEEE

K. D. Strang and N. R. Vajjhala, “Can Project Team Members’ Willingness to Disclose Past Performance During Procurement Improve Organizational Business Process Success?” Information, vol. 16, no. 11, Art. no. 955, Nov. 2025, doi: 10.3390/info16110955.Copy IEEE citation

@article{strang2025projectteam,
  title = {Can Project Team Members’ Willingness to Disclose Past Performance During Procurement Improve Organizational Business Process Success?},
  author = {Strang, Kenneth David and Vajjhala, Narasimha Rao},
  journal = {Information},
  volume = {16},
  number = {11},
  pages = {955},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {MDPI},
  doi = {10.3390/info16110955},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3390/info16110955}
}

TY  - JOUR
TI  - Can Project Team Members’ Willingness to Disclose Past Performance During Procurement Improve Organizational Business Process Success?
AU  - Strang, Kenneth David
AU  - Vajjhala, Narasimha Rao
JO  - Information
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/11/04
VL  - 16
IS  - 11
SP  - 955
PB  - MDPI
SN  - 2078-2489
DO  - 10.3390/info16110955
UR  - https://www.narasimharao.net/research/project-team-past-performance-disclosure-fintech-project-success/
LA  - en
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Links and files

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/info16110955
• Publisher’s page: https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/16/11/955
• Full text (PDF): https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/16/11/955/pdf
• This page as text: https://www.narasimharao.net/research/project-team-past-performance-disclosure-fintech-project-success/paper.md
• Permanent address of this page: https://www.narasimharao.net/research/project-team-past-performance-disclosure-fintech-project-success/