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Little specific research has been conducted to date on the adaptation of agile information systems development (ISD) methods. This article presents the work practice in dealing with the adaptation of such a method in the ISD department of one of the leading financial institutes in Europe. Two forms of method adaptation, static adaptation and dynamic adaptation, are introduced and discussed in detail. We provide some insights plus an instrument that the ISD department studied uses to deal with the dynamic method adaptation. To enhance our understanding of the observed practice, we take into account two complementary perspectives: the engineering perspective and the socio-organizational perspective. Practical and theoretical implications of this study are discussed.

This chapter describes an in-depth analysis of successful and unsuccessful offshore custom software development (CSD) projects. Offshore projects tend to be unsuccessful, because physical, time, cultural, organizational, and stakeholder distances negatively influence communication and knowledge exchange between onshore and offshore project team members. The success rate of 19 offshore CSD projects was characterized with regard to scope, quality, time, and costs, by interviewing onshore and offshore project managers. Unsuccessful projects had a complex organization and team members who did not work together in previous projects. All reasons for success and failure were categorized and compared. A characteristic that successful projects had in common was the availability of informal mutual adjustment, which means facilitating the informal communication between the team members in the right way. A major characteristic that unsuccessful projects had in common was improper planning, which has a large influence on the team results in an offshore CSD project. The implementation of standards was neither mentioned by the successful projects as a major reason for success, nor by the unsuccessful projects as a major reason for failure. This research advises that in order to be successful, a project manager of a new offshore CSD project should not spend too much time on standards, but on planning and informal mutual adjustment.