Are we using a saw to hammer a nail? : Opportunities and challenges of user involvement in remote IT projects; from the perspective of IT consultants

Sammanfattning: User involvement has been championed as essential for the success of IT projects, both by practitioners as well as academia. Traditionally, user involvement activities between clients and consultants have been conducted in physical closeness. However, maintaining this closeness became increasingly challenging when people were largely required to work remotely during the years of 2020 and 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on this abrupt change in the physical proximity in the client-consultant relationships we wanted to see how well digital communication media could support user involvement activities in a remote setting and explore potential opportunities and challenges related to the digital substitutes. Our results show that digital communication media make the development of relational aspects in the client-consultant relationship, such as trust, closeness and engagement challenging. On the other hand, when discussing user involvement tasks such as workshops and prototyping sessions, the consultants displayed positive attitudes towards using digital media. Lastly, there are opportunities and challenges that exist within the realm of remote user involvement, all of which depend on contextual factors such as task complexity, information characteristics and lastly the interpersonal needs of a given client-consultant relationship.