Knowledge clusters: Dealing with a multilevel phenomenon

Although there are a number of purported benefits of agile systems development methods over traditional forms, many in the Information Systems Development (ISD) community highlight the difficulties that the dynamic, turbulent nature of agile development environments may present. One prominent difference compared to traditional ISD projects is the emphasised presence of the customer in decision-making. Specifically, project management and decision-making can be significantly more challenging than in projects involving traditional development approaches. This paper describes a research-in-progress, that focuses on decision-making in agile projects, and aims to develop a better understanding of how agile teams present dynamic data to decision makers who may act “on the fly”, and in so doing lead to effective, high quality decision-making in agile environments. The goal of the paper with its three case studies is to develop a set of best practices for representing decision-making data in agile ISD projects