Beyond Budgeting: A Performance Management Model for Software Development Teams

The Beyond Budgeting performance management model enables companies to keep pace with changing environments, to quickly create and adapt strategy and to empower people throughout the organisation to make effective choices. We argue that this performance management model may be ideal for agile software development. Although drawn from different disciplines, both are designed for a customer-orientated, fast-changing operating environment and the Beyond Budgeting model suggests a useful overall framework for research in the performance management of agile software development teams. This paper uses the model as a lens to examine the performance management of agile software development teams within a large multinational. The findings show that some traditional performance management processes (most notably the budgeting process), which were designed to aid in the performance management of software development teams may impede the performance of agile teams due to their suitability adherence to the requirements of the systems development lifecycle model.