Stakeholder Involvement and Team Working in Systems Development Practice

Abstract

Information Systems (IS) play a central role in the construction, adaptation and renewal of an organizations infrastructure. Current IS development projects are characterized by multiple dependencies, rapid technology innovation, team diversity, and most importantly the dynamic requirements of business envi-ronments which necessitates responsive system development approaches. However an organizations’ culture can adversely affect the system development approach adopted. Through the lens of a recent real-world UK Government IS project this chapter examines how the inherent nature of the organization adversely affected the key characteristics of the agile development approach adopted. We examine the theory and illustrate how theory does or does not align to practice actuated in the case study. We particularly consider the way in which aspects of user involvement and team working practices were mismatched to the host organizations culture that prevented the necessary co-operative and collaborative collective being established in practice. Thus, we aim to increase the understanding of the difficulties of user/stakeholder involvement experienced in practice to enable better understanding of the practical implications within the domain of IS development.