Abstract
The budget and time overrun of information system development (ISD) project have been a major concern for the corporate managers. Such mismanagement often causes high failure rate of IS projects. The project team is composed of multiple parties which have different interests and purposes. Therefore the coherent purpose and an agreeable climate for the cooperation would have critical impact on the eventual result of the project. Pre-project partnering was adopted to create collaborative atmosphere among the project team members. Requirement uncertainty also pervades ISD stages, and easily causes the conflict as a result of frequently interaction. For that reason, requirement analysis is needed to be conducted by users and IS staff during ISD. In this study, we try to find the causal relationship among the pre-project partnering, requirement uncertainty, interpersonal conflict and project performance according to empirical data.Our data collected from the corporation of Taiwan. The research findings showed: (1) pre-project partnering could reduce the requirement uncertainty effectively; (2) requirement uncertainty has negative impact to the project performance; (3) requirement uncertainty has positive effect on interpersonal conflict; (4) The relationship between pre-project partnering and interpersonal conflict is not significant; (5) the relationship between interpersonal conflict and project performance is not significant.As for the implications for management, we suggest to establish an effective communication channel and interaction platform through pre-project partnering activities. Increasing the opportunities to interact with each other before the project begins would help to do the requirement analysis well. The lower the requirement uncertainty results in the better eventual project performance and the lower of interpersonal conflict.