Achieving business impact with IT : A qualitative study of the practice and theory of driving change with technology, interaction and service design

Abstract: As our society becomes more and more digitalized, IT projects play an increasingly important role. The relatively high failure rates in IT projects have spurred the development of methods and models to improve success rate by managing for outcomes rather than constraints. This thesis aims to contribute to our understanding of how outcome-based project methods are used in practice, and how they’re understood and conceptualized by their users such as project managers, product managers and interaction designers. It provides an overview of seven methods for managing projects for outcomes and presents findings regarding how users of a subset of these methods apply and reason about them. The study’s findings include the identification of six themes regarding the application and use of these methods and four concepts describing how they’re understood. The results indicate that the methods studied have a wide-reaching influence over workplace collaboration and culture, and provide generic strategies for solving problems in the domains of software development, interaction design and service design. Further research is recommended to determine how these methods can be used and improved to further enhance collaboration, communication, and motivation in the workplace and the methods’ wider influence on IT project success.