Customer-Supplier Issues in Software Development

Many studies list the customer-supplier -relationship related issues among the most important reasons for software project failures. Today most of the software development is done outside the organization actually using the software, so the organizational interface of customer and supplier is something that we just need to live with. Since it is not possible, or desirable, to eliminate this interface, we need proper ways to manage the issues introduced by this organizational interface. In this paper we shall look at the customer-supplier interface and issues related to it. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate common issues and how they can manifest themselves in the software development context. Our study identified six issues related to customer-supplier interface. The issues were related to knowledge transfer, changes during projects, and power relations between customers and suppliers. The paper has implications both for the practice and research. For practitioners the identification and exploration of the issues will provide a solid basis to manage these problems as they come up in practice. For researchers the paper provides an empirically founded description of issues identified in customer-supplier interface.