Garry Lohan

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.

A Brief History of Budgeting: Reflections on Beyond Budgeting, Its Link to Performance Management and Its Appropriateness for Software Development

Beyond Budgeting is an innovation from the management accounting literature that seeks to improve performance and manage organisations through flexible sense-and-respond type mechanisms, rather than the more rigid traditional command-and-control models. This contemporary thinking in management accounting resonates strongly with contemporary thinking in information systems development (ISD). In particular, the Beyond Budgeting model shares many similarities with agile software development (ASD) with both having a distinctly agile and flexible foundation. This paper discusses the history of Beyond Budgeting, its relationship with performance management and its appropriateness for the field of software development.

A Performance Management Model for Agile Information Systems Development Teams

The prevailing trend in ISD is one of poor project performances, with budget overruns commonly in excess of 300 % and many failing altogether. To address this trend ISD research always focuses on the ISD process, user involvement and the people involved. Rarely, if ever are wider organisational processes questioned. This paper argues for a cohesive and ongoing inclusion of wider organisational factors in efforts to address and improve ISD project performance. Given the poor budgetary performance of ISD projects, budgeting is one that we feel requires particular attention. Contemporary research in budgeting (e.g. Beyond Budgeting) and in ISD (e.g. agile methods) attempts to address similar issues albeit from a different angles. This paper draws on two case studies of seven ISD teams to apply the Beyond Budgeting model to an ISD environment. We demonstrate the value of using the Beyond Budgeting model to develop a cohesive research agenda within ISD used to identify gaps and suggest improvements to agile methods, probably the most well-known and accepted contemporary ISD approach.

Beyond Budgeting: A Performance Management Model for Software Development Teams

The Beyond Budgeting performance management model enables companies to keep pace with changing environments, to quickly create and adapt strategy and to empower people throughout the organisation to make effective choices. We argue that this performance management model may be ideal for agile software development. Although drawn from different disciplines, both are designed for a customer-orientated, fast-changing operating environment and the Beyond Budgeting model suggests a useful overall framework for research in the performance management of agile software development teams. This paper uses the model as a lens to examine the performance management of agile software development teams within a large multinational. The findings show that some traditional performance management processes (most notably the budgeting process), which were designed to aid in the performance management of software development teams may impede the performance of agile teams due to their suitability adherence to the requirements of the systems development lifecycle model.