Bridging 22,000 voices: A teaching case on infrastructure for user representatives in large-scale agile software development

Abstract

This teaching case examines how a large European public welfare administration redesigned its approach to user participation during a major transition from outsourced development to large-scale agile and product-based software engineering. Drawing on the organization’s decade-long digitalization history and the failure of a major ICT modernization program, the case illustrates how insufficient involvement of frontline employees created misalignments between digitalization and operational work. After 2016, the administration introduced a structured user-involvement infrastructure, built around regional implementation coordinators and local change agents, to facilitate communication, coordinate training, and gather representative user feedback from more than 22,000 employees. The case highlights the complexities of scaling user involvement in distributed public-sector settings and underscores tensions around representation, knowledge sharing, and organizational bureaucracy. It enables students to analyze socio-technical coordination challenges and evaluate the effectiveness of representative user participation in large-scale agile development.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Systems and Software, 2026 · DOI ↗