Procurement competence and its effect on software development projects : From the perspective of software supplier professionals within the private sector

Sammanfattning: Organizations that do not possess the knowledge or resources to develop IT internally must procure software development projects from external parties. The organization making the procurement is in this thesis referred to as the software customer organization (SCO) and the external party is referred to as the software vendor organization (SVO).  The success of procuring products or services depends on the procurement competence of SCO professionals (Stek & Schiele, 2021). Procurement competence are the individual-level foundations of organisational purchasing and supply management performance (Bals et al., 2019). This thesis aims to investigate what challenges occur within software development projects where SCO professionals have poor procurement competence and build an understanding of how SVO professionals can mitigate or overcome these challenges.  Through semi-structured interviews with project managers from a SVO, six challenges were identified: Fuzzy requirements, Unrealistic expectations, Understanding of the problem, Unaware of the software development process, Inadequate software setting-to-work process, and Poor communication.  Most challenges can be mitigated through a carefully conducted feasibility study beginning by asking questions about the SCO’s previous experiences with software development projects, what competencies they currently have and how they usually work with software development projects. Asking these questions makes it possible to assess the level of the SCO professional’s procurement competence. After assessing, the following actions can be taken: Conducting a workshop on how the SVO’s software development process works, bringing in external requirement experts if needed, and setting up clear communication paths.