A brief history of budgeting: Reflections on beyond budgeting, its link to performance management and its appropriateness for software development

Abstract

Beyond Budgeting is an innovation from the management accounting literature that seeks to improve performance and manage organisations through flexible sense-and-respond type mechanisms, rather than the more rigid traditional command-and-control models. This contemporary thinking in management accounting resonates strongly with contemporary thinking in information systems development (ISD). In particular, the Beyond Budgeting model shares many similarities with agile software development (ASD) with both having a distinctly agile and flexible foundation. This paper discusses the history of Beyond Budgeting, its relationship with performance management and its appropriateness for the field of software development.