Evaluating New Management Tools: An Exploratory Quasi-Field Experiment

There are increasing calls to deliver management research that benefits practitioners. Development of new tools is a potential avenue to provide such practice-relevant contributions. This case discusses and critiques the use of a quasi-field experiment to give a preliminary evaluation of a new toolset for project managers. The toolset was a catalog of visual archetypes (templates) to communicate common project concepts to stakeholders. Eleven project managers were recruited to participate in this field experiment, and seven chose to trial at least one of the visual archetypes and submitted a response to an online survey. This method was useful in providing initial feedback on the potential benefits of the toolset in real-life contexts and provided evidence for continued exploration of their use in practice. The main challenges were encouraging recruited participants to participate in trialing the archetypes and eliciting a survey response given the many demands on their time. Overall, the study design was useful as an exploratory research study to provide an initial evaluation of a new management toolset.