Understanding and Managing Process Interaction in IS Development Projects

Software-based information systems must be developed and implemented as a part of business change. This is a major challenge, since business change and the development of software-based information systems usually are performed in separate processes. Thus, there is a need to understand and manage the relationship between these two kinds of processes. In this paper we draw on a longitudinal case study. We suggest a framework to analyze the case as interaction between software development processes and organizational change processes. In the analysis we find that the framework enables us to understand critical events in the case, what led to the events, and what the consequences are. We discuss the implications for information systems research and in particular we discuss the contribution to project management of iterative and incremental software development.