The Impact of Control on Teams in Agile Information Systems Development

Agile information systems development (ISD) methodologies can now look back on almost 30 years of history. However, it is precisely these methodologies that continue to attract the attention of the research community today. Agile ISD strongly relies on social interaction and teamwork. In consequence, team processes and agile practices adopted by team members take an integral part in the success of agile ISD projects. The ability to respond and react to changing or unforeseen user requirements becomes essential and is bolstered by granting higher levels of autonomy within an agile ISD team. However, existing studies on team autonomy in agile ISD imply that these teams not only benefit from team autonomy itself but also from different elements of control. Research suggests that control leads to better performance within a team, even though the exercise of control inevitably imposes certain boundaries on the concept of team autonomy. Yet, research faces an ongoing challenge in constituting a comprehensive understanding of how control should be used in agile ISD and how it affects certain levels along the whole ISD process. The dissertation’s objective is to improve our understanding of the influence of control on agile ISD teams in terms of team autonomy and team performance and how to enact control in agile ISD settings. This is achieved by conducting five independent but interrelated studies, which focus on the development and testing of a research model based on a solid theoretical foundation. As a theoretical framework, control theory is employed and extended with novel insights from the expanded theoretical framework of IS project control. Collectively, these studies substantially extend our knowledge of the matter of control in agile ISD in general, and in particular, how control enactment can be linked to agile practices while considering different control styles, and how different types of control influence autonomy and performance in agile ISD teams