Managing Process Interaction in IS Development Projects

Increasingly, information systems must be developed and implemented as a part of business change. This is a challenge for the IS project manager, since business change and information systems development usually are performed as separate processes. Thus, there is a need to understand and manage the relationship between these two kinds of processes. To understand the interaction between information systems development and planned organizational change we introduce the concept of process interaction. We draw on a longitudinal case study of an IS development project that used an iterative and incremental development approach. The concept of process interaction enabled us to understand critical events in the case, in particular those that were important for the mutual adaptation between the information system and the organization. We conclude that process interaction is needed to facilitate socio-technical innovation in a situation where the organizational change process and the IS development process are parallel but incongruent. We also argue that iterative software engineering frameworks are well structured to support process interaction. Finally, we advocate that the IS project manager needs to manage the trade-off between necessary process interaction and the internal IS project schedule.