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In-Depth Information
been encountered in earlier installations of the software at other universities. The
following quote provides a salient example:
I think the thing that worked against me the most in my goal to limit the changes was
the consultants. Unfortunately they had been on other projects that either were not very
disciplined about the changes they made or had bigger budgets or had larger IT teams behind
them or for whatever reason went ahead and made a lot of these changes. Basically we were
getting in situations where the consultants were saying, 'You've got to do this. Other schools
do.' Really 'other schools do' meant one or two that they had just recently been at.
-
SIS
Technical Lead
The experiences from both of the projects illustrate the fact that RE efforts are
frequently impeded by the assumptions that users and developers alike bring to a
design effort regardless of their applicability in the focal environment.
5.5 Business-IT Relationship
Despite the general perception of positive relationships between users and IT per-
sonnel in the cases the projects suffered from poor IT business relationships. In both
projects, mistrust between users and IT arose to challenge the successful determi-
nation of requirements. In the SIS project, team members perceived distrust among
some of the other stakeholders. As the Communications Lead observed:
Some schools [within the University] don't want anything to do with it [i.e., the new plat-
form]. They just are being really difficult. I just don't know. I still have not understood why.
PeopleSoft is here and it's not going away.
On the IPSI project, although the IT team (i.e., the BSI personnel) was new to
most of the agencies, several of the users came to the project with expectations of
an adversarial relationship:
We were looking through it [an interface mock-up] and trying to calm them down because
they thought it was going to be one of these, 'You're going to do it and that's the end of it'
situations
...
[So their reaction was,] 'Don't tell us this is what you want because it's not
good enough. It doesn't serve our purposes. You're not making our life easy; you're making
it hard.' So we said, 'This is just a draft. It was just a start. Don't get excited
...
Let's take
it easy and come to some kind of compromise.'
-
Senior Developer
Thus, as with the paradigmatic constraints, challenges in the business-IT rela-
tionship reflect the importation of expectations of an adversarial relationship, even
when no breach of trust has actually occurred.
5.6 Communication Skills
The communication skills of IT professionals and users was not a primary emphasis
in either of the projects observed. However, some concerns over the effectiveness of
communications between IT and business-oriented stakeholders did surface. In the
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