Co-Designing Sustainable Coordination to Support Inter-Organizational Decision Making

Abstract

Processes in inter-organizational projects tend to be complex to coordinate. Within these projects, stakeholders have to make decisions together, despite a limited awareness of the other parties’ interests and views. Frequently, coordination in inter-organizational projects is ineffective and inadequately addressed, despite the investment of considerable effort, which often results in delays and/or unwanted project outcomes. The purpose of this study is to investigate how a shared problem understanding for inter-organizational decision making can be achieved by means of sustainable coordination. In this study, CIMO logic was used to explore the context of the organizational change, followed by the application of design science research in order to develop an intervision process. The findings of this study are twofold. To manage the complex problem context, additional efforts were needed in order to create awareness of the team’s coordination activities. The application of the concept of co-designing resulted in a higher degree of sustainable relational coordination. The resulting intervision process aided the team in gaining a shared problem understanding of the decision making process in the inter-organizational project. The use of the co-designed intervision process can potentially be employed for other complex systematic problems, such as those occurring in the construction industry.