The Nipo Grid - A Construct for Studying Systems Development Practices in Organizations

This paper presents intermediate results from a study of issues which influence shaping of information systems development (ISD) practices in systems and software development organizations. In line with previous research, the target organizations of our study tend to create local development practices by picking individual practices from (possibly different) methods combined with emergent practices, rather than by deploying completely pre-defined methods. ISD practices-in-use may vary with regard to the scope of their intended enactment and to their actual utilization. This article suggests a construct by which any defined development practice (or absence of defined practices) can be categorized according to two dimensions: the intended scope of defined practices vs. the scope of actually enacted practices. With regard to the both of these dimensions, any particular practice may be defined versus actually followed at four levels: not at all (N), individually (I), project-level (P) or by the whole development organization (O). The resulting construct, “The NIPO Grid”, integrates the previous discussions and concepts about how ISD practices are actually shaped in organizations, such as amethodical systems development, the method-in-use, and software process improvement. We propose it as a construct, a dependent variable, which helps our research towards forming a theory or theories why definitions and actual enactment of particular types of development practices vary among development organizations.