Information systems outsourcing has not only become prevalent but also involves an increasingly wide range of activities beyond the traditional programming, testing, documentation, and localization activities to include complex business-focused project planning, process design, requirements determination, and logical and physical systems designs. Such complex IS outsourcing often requires interactions among various stakeholders across different locations and cultures and therefore is much more difficult to manage than the traditional IS outsourcing. Coordination and control have been viewed as especially important project management strategies for managing project activities; however, little research has focused on how they relate to each other and how they collectively affect the performance of complex IS outsourcing projects. In this study, we examine the differential performance effects of outcome and behavior controls on coordination and show that the effect of outcome control on project performance is mediated by coordination.

Software development teams are increasingly global. Team members are separated by multiple boundaries such as geographic location, time zone, culture, and organization, presenting substantial coordination challenges. Global software development becomes even more challenging when user requirements change dynamically. However, little empirical research has investigated how team dispersion across multiple boundaries and user requirements dynamism, which collectively increase task environment complexity, influence team coordination and software development success in the global context. Further, we have a limited understanding of how software process capabilities such as rigor, standardization, agility, and customizability mitigate the negative effects of global team dispersion and user requirements dynamism. To address these important issues, we test a set of relevant hypotheses using field survey data obtained from both project managers and stakeholders. Our results show that global team dispersion and user requirements dynamism have a negative effect on coordination effectiveness. We find that the negative effect of global team dispersion on coordination effectiveness decreases as process standardization increases and that the negative effect of user requirements dynamism on coordination effectiveness decreases as process agility increases. We find that coordination effectiveness has a positive effect on global software development success in terms of both process and product aspects.

The socio-technical perspective suggests that information systems development projects (ISDPs) involve both organizational and technical dimensions. As both the organizational and technical aspects of ISDPs frequently change, the ISDP team's flexibility in responding to these changes has become a critical success factor for system development. While the importance of ISDP team flexibility has increased, the research literature lacks a consistent definition and validated measures of the construct. Drawing upon the socio-technical and the capability-based perspectives and using a systematic multi-stage approach, we identified major business and technology changes and developed measurement scales of ISDP team flexibility along two dimensions: Response Extensiveness and Response Efficiency. The results of a confirmatory factor analysis using survey data from 505 ISDP managers suggested that the final measurement scales exhibited adequate levels of measurement properties including unidimensionality, reliability, discriminant validity, factorial invariance and nomological validity. In addition, our results revealed an interesting negative relationship between Response Extensiveness and Response Efficiency, indicating a trade-off between the two dimensions of flexibility. Our result indicated that while the ISDP teams experienced and responded more extensively to business changes than technology changes, they were much less efficient in dealing with business changes than technology changes.