A case study of documentation's significance : in ERP system development projects

Sammanfattning: Abstract In order to stay competitive in today’s changing business world, companies need to manage the increased complexity as they evolve. To be able to handle this complexity, many companies chose to implement an ERP system. Investing in an ERP system is not something that is made in a trice but is a large investment which together with today’s low-profit margins in companies makes it essential to keep the costs as low as possible. More than half of the total cost for an ERP investment is said to be related to costs for the system’s maintenance and support. Documentation is one of the factors which affect this cost, and if it is not made satisfactorily it is said to result in a considerable increase of the system’s total cost. This is why it is important not to overlook the documentation as a part of ERP system development project. The purpose with this thesis is to investigate the existing documentation routines in ERP system development projects at AB Volvo’s subsidiary Volvo IT, in order to find suggestions of improvement for future projects. In order to fulfill the purpose of the study, we formed a research question with three sub-questions and through a deep analysis of the empirical material we presented the answers to these questions as the conclusions of this thesis. Our study is based on an inductive research approach using a case study to gain deeper and more helpful qualitative knowledge and data. The empirical data was analyzed using the template analysis method where we divided the collected data into appropriate categories. The knowledge created through this study is of exploratory, normative, predictive and categorical nature. After having analyzed the results from our case study we found several suggestions of improvements for Volvo IT to use in future projects. For other companies involved in ERP system development projects of their own, the conclusions of this thesis will work as valuable issues to take into consideration for upcoming projects. We have concluded that the main reason behind lacking quality of documentation in the development projects is not the unawareness of its importance, but the absence of concrete evidence of high quality documentation’s positive effects on a system’s total cost. We believe that in order to achieve documentation of high quality, there needs to be a change of attitude to documentation as a work task and the task itself must be higher prioritized in the projects. Another important suggestion is that a control of the conducted documentation’s quality must be done, not only a control of the existence of the right kind of documents. We are of the opinion that a company should not allocate resources to create a method of documentation before the importance of high quality documentation is clarified. Ultimately, we believe that the system development process should be focused around the customer, because of the more frequent use of custom made solutions and to help the people in the project to set the right level of abstraction on the documentation.