# Project Management Information Systems (PMISs):
## 1 Introduction  
Nowadays, Project Managers (PMs) deal with increasingly complex projects from both organizational and technological perspectives [1]. This complexity is even higher when a multiplicity of conflicting goals is to be achieved [2] and/or limited resources are available [3, 4]. PMs often have to make fast decisions--rapidly adapting to changes in the project management field--and to satisfy all specifications with the aim to deliver projects in time and within the planned budget [5, 6]. In this context, Project Management Information Systems (PMISs) are useful tools and techniques to gather, integrate and disseminate the outputs of project management processes [7], supporting PMs in planning, organizing and controlling projects of different complexity. As a result, a wide range of PMIS software is available on the market. Contrary to the customized versions, commercial PMIS software is ready-to-use mass products aimed at generic users [8, 9, 10], and their choice is a tricky task. Aiming to obtain an exhaustive list of features commonly owned by PMIS software, literature contributions to the field were reviewed, and the main commercial PMIS software was analyzed. Afterwards, collected features were examined by the authors, on the one hand, and by a group of experts, on the other hand, in order to exclude redundant functionalities and/or to merge the similar ones. This way, a reduced list of features was obtained, and a two-level hierarchical structure--comprising features and sub-features--was developed to offer a synthetic and easier overall view of the problem. To evaluate the relative importance of selected features/sub-features, two surveys were first designed--the first by Design of Experiment (DoE) and conjoint analysis, while the second by the ranking scale method--and distributed to a representative panel of experts in the field. Finally, astatistical-based analysis was performed to weigh the selected features, and the interaction between respondents' profiles and PMIS features was also investigated by cluster and respondents' analyses, for the first and second surveys, respectively.  
Despite several literature contributions dealing with the application of PMISs and the evaluation of their usefulness and performance [11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19; 20; 21; 22; 23; 24], few of them are concerned with determining the fundamental features that a PMIS should have and assessing their relative importance. In the authors' opinion, the analysis of both the main commercial PMIS software and the scientific contributions in the field provides a structured framework to have an overall view of the state-of-the-art. In addition, the outcomes of the performed quantitative analysis may be used by researchers and practitioners to make proper decisions when choosing and/or developing PMIS software. Therefore, the purpose of the present work is threefold and may be summarized through the following Research Questions (RQs):  
RQ1. What are the main features that PMIS software should contain?  
RQ2. What is the relative importance of selected features?  
RQ3. Is there any interaction between the relative importance of the identified features and the respondent's profile?  
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. The literature review is presented in Section 2, and the methodological approach is described in Section 3. Results and discussion are synthesized in Section 4. Conclusions close the work in Section 5.