Harmonizing Critical Success Factors in Agile ISD Projects

Over time, various information systems development (ISD) approaches have emerged, principal of which are plan-driven and agile approaches. While agile ISD approaches have been promoted as replacements for plan-driven development to enhance responsiveness to changing customer needs, in practice organizations tend to use practices from both of them. This combination represents a challenge for decision-makers that utilize critical success factors (CSFs) to manage the development project because, so far, prior research has identified CSFs for either traditional or agile ISD projects, but not when an agile ISD project has elements from plan-driven development added. This paper theorizes about how CSFs change for agile ISD projects which have plan-driven practices added and empirically investigates the content of these CSFs. Through a qualitative study eight CSFs, allocated into four method dimensions, are identified to give a parsimonious number of areas that contribute to the success of an agile ISD projects.