Managing the Political and Cultural Aspects of Large-Scale MIS Projects: A Case Study of Participative Systems Development

Whether user participation in the Management Information Systems (MIS) development process is beneficial continues to be an uncertain issue. Although proponents claim user participation is important to MIS success, others indicate that user participation can be dysfunctional, thus leading to suboptimal systems that take longer to develop. Nonetheless, very little is written about how to implement and manage participative systems development activities. This paper presents a case study on how participative systems development was implemented and managed in a very large scale MIS project. The discussion points out that while adopting this development approach did lengthen the schedule and increase the costs of the development over original projections, it also led to a series of smooth incremental implementations.