Reducing complexity using an interaction room: an experience report

Abstract

Large-scale information system evolution projects often place high demands on both business and technical stakeholders' cognitive and communication skills. Especially if the need for evolution is not confined to a particular feature, but affects the whole value chain, finding dependencies and interrelationships between processes and components is challenging as it requires cross-departmental understanding. These issues can be even more challenging for management stakeholders who need to make high-level and far-reaching decisions on implementation strategies despite not being deeply involved in the technical details. One of the main problems in such projects is that the stakeholders who have expert knowledge typically have only little methodical experience, while the method experts lack the business experience. In this paper, we report on experiences and lessons from a large systems evolution project in a German insurance company, where we applied a new approach -- the so-called "Interaction Room" -- to improve stakeholders' understanding of the project's risks and dependencies in a pragmatic way, without overwhelming them with a heavyweight analysis method.