BEYOND BUDGETING AND AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT OF AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT TEAMS

Around the same time as the emergence of agile methods as a formalized concept, the management accounting literature introduced the concept of Beyond Budgeting as a performance management model for changing business environments. Both concepts share many similarities with both having a distinctly agile or adaptive perspective. The Beyond Budgeting model promises to enable companies to keep pace with changing business environments, quickly create and adapt strategy and empower people throughout the organization to make effective changes. This research in progress paper attempts to develop the Beyond Budgeting model within the context of agile software development teams. The twelve Beyond Budgeting principles are discussed and a research framework is presented. This framework is being used in two case studies to investigate the organizational issues and challenges that affect the performance of agile software development teams

The Impact of Group Cohesiveness on Decision-Making Outcomes under Conditions of Challenging and Hindrance Time Pressure

Group decision making is increasingly important for the successful completion of software development projects. Group oriented development approaches such as agile methods, which emphasize a sense-and-respond approach are becoming an integral part of software development. These methods are being used by an increasing number of organizations as a means of improving the agility and quality of the development process, and within these processes groups are increasingly involved in critical decision making. Groups are required to make regular group decisions and group members work closely with each other to develop software in time-boxed iterations. However, the literature lacks a clear understanding about how varying degrees of time pressure affects the decision outcomes of the development groups. As group cohesion is viewed as the most fundamental issue facing group decision-making processes, in this research-in-progress paper we develop a research instrument to measure the impact of time pressure and group cohesion on decision-making outcomes

Extending Agile Systems Development: An Application of the Beyond Budgeting Model

The field of information systems development (ISD) is continuously evolving, with new development practices and methodologies regularly introduced to the field. It is widely recognised that one of the most recent family of methodologies, agile methods, is fast becoming one of the most commonly used. Surveys have recently shown that the majority of systems development teams worldwide are using agile practices in some form. While there is a growing body of research examining agile methods and the theoretical bases and implications of agile practices, very little research has addressed concerns raised by both academics and practitioners regarding the integration of agile practices with and within traditional organisational environments. Recent empirical evidence suggests that agile practices are not well suited to traditional organisational environments. Organisations need to consider how best to extend agile practices beyond the systems development team to facilitate the required integration with the wider organisational environment. Beyond Budgeting is an innovation from the management accounting literature that seeks to manage organisations through flexible sense-and-respond type mechanisms, rather than the more rigid traditional command-and-control models. This study is based on the premise that the principles of the Beyond Budgeting management model are well suited to an agile systems development (ASD) environment. The study operationalises the Beyond Budgeting model and applies it in an ASD environment. The findings suggest that contemporary thinking in management accounting resonates strongly with contemporary thinking in ISD. The Beyond Budgeting model shares many similarities with ASD with both having a distinctly agile and flexible foundation. By using the Beyond Budgeting model as a lens to examine seven ASD teams this research discovered that legacy organisational processes and mechanisms have a direct impact on the regular operations of the ASD teams. The study highlights that organisations need to consider how traditional processes and mechanisms will affect the ASD environment. Functional areas within the organisations such as human resources and budgeting need to be aware that agile practices require a change from how they traditionally operated. ASD teams find many difficulties when operating within traditional processes. Applying the operationalised model has highlighted these difficulties and discovered where current ASD practices do not sufficiently address the issues teams face. For example, issues surrounding customer relationships, a central axiom of ASD, are far from well understood. ASD teams need to further consider and develop the complex developer-customer relationship. They need to better understand the role the customer proxy has in the development process. Relationships with other teams and with others within the organisation also have an important role in an ASD environment and are not sufficiently addressed by current ASD practices. From the findings of this study a set of nine recommendations are made to extend and improve upon current ASD practices

Project Management in Information Systems Development

Although there is a growing body of literature concerned with the adoption of agile software development within a large organization, there is still very little in terms of empirical research of practice. This research uses principles from the Beyond Budgeting model to investigate the budgeting practices of large organizations using an agile method. Budgeting is taken in this context to mean the performance management process that executes the organizations financial plan (Hope and Fraser 2003). Using this model, the research will seek to establish a framework for ¿agile project budgeting¿ which can be used as a tool to help with the alignment of the Finance and IT functions of a large organization. The main research questions identified thus far are; How are Beyond Budgeting principles used in agile software development? What are the advantages and disadvantages with combining the Beyond Budgeting principles with agile software development? How might organizations optimize their budget process to facilitate agile development? Using case study research methods including open-ended interviews the researcher will conduct two in depth case studies to develop the agile project budgeting framework

Having a Customer Focus in Agile Software Development

This research looks at the customer focus of agile software development teams. The study is part of a larger study examining how the twelve principles of Beyond Budgeting are operationalised in the context of an agile development environment. Using two case study sites and a semi-structured interview approach the customer focus of agile teams operating within two large organisations is examined. In these organisations the direct customer is not the end user of the product; rather they are another group within the organisation downstream of the agile development team. The results suggest that while organisations may espouse to have a customer focus the structures may not be in place to enable sufficient sharing of customer knowledge and utilisation of customer feedback. Emergent themes from the study suggest that customer identification, customer characteristics, customer location and the teams¿ experience of the customer and their domain may have an impact on the customer focus of an agile team.peer-reviewe

Project Management in Information Systems Development

peer-reviewe

An Investigation into Time Pressure, Group Cohesion and Decision Making in Software Development Groups

Two of the key themes in contemporary information systems development (ISD) literature are (i) how to build and release systems in shorter time frames and (ii) how to enable development groups to build systems in a cohesive manner. This is reflected by today’s predominant contemporary ISD methods such as agile, their distinguishing feature being an explicit emphasis on continuous, timely releases and a facilitation of effective group collaboration and communication. In a survey of 119 software developers we explore the effects of group cohesion and two types of time pressure, hindrance and challenge, on the decision-making quality of ISD groups. Our results showed challenge time pressure and group cohesion to have a positive effect with hindrance time pressure having no significant impact. We discuss the implications of this and offer insights with respect to theory and practice for those wishing to improve the decision-making quality of their ISD groups

Performance Management of Agile Software Development Teams

Around the same time as the emergence of agile methods as a formalized concept, the management accounting literature introduced the concept of Beyond Budgeting as a performance management model for a changing business environment. Both concepts share many similarities with both having a distinctly agile or adaptive perspective. The Beyond Budgeting model promises to enable companies to keep pace with changing environments, quickly create and adapt strategy and empower people throughout the organization to make effective changes. This paper develops the Beyond Budgeting model within the context of agile software development teams. The twelve Beyond Budgeting principles are briefly summarized and a research framework is presented which is applied using one case study. The results from the study suggest that the model may be a suitable lens through which an organization can gain an understanding of the organizational level factors, which affect the implementation of agile. The paper discusses how the model was developed, applied and how the conclusions are reached

Examining Customer Focus in Agile Systems Development Teams - Findings from Irish and Norwegian Case Studies

While an acute, continuous focus on customer needs is often cited as a key benefit of agile approaches, very little research has examined the customer focus construct in an agile project environment, or looked at the implications or recommendations for project managers. We draw on contemporary theories on customer focus to develop a framework for understanding customer focus in an agile project management context. This framework is applied to cases in Ireland and Norway and the results suggest that while agile approaches appear to increase customer focus, this is by no means guaranteed. In fact there may be significant challenges and problems for project managers to overcome. For example, new communication issues with customer proxies may impair understanding of customer needs and requirements. The project manager needs to consider the identity, location, perceived personality of the customer, and the team s prior experience with the customer, all of which this research shows can affect the customer focus of the agile team. From this research, a new, empirically validated agile development customer focus framework is presented, providing project managers with a set of factors to be considered in becoming a truly customer focused agile IT project team