Balancing the Value and Risk of Socio-Technical Congruence

If socio-technical congruence can bring about benefits such as better performance to a software development project, then actions that improve the level of congruence have a potential to increase the overall project value. However, those actions may also incur a cost, and bring additional risks into the project. We propose a number of alternative actions for increasing sociotechnical congruence, based on the representation of congruence gaps in the socio-technical graph of the project. We also describe the costs and risks corresponding to those actions, to highlight how they represent options for the governance of the project, each of which impacts a different aspect, ranging from architectural decomposition, to team work practices, to project scheduling.