From Business Strategy to Information Technology Roadmap

Appendix G: Buy or Build (Commercial Off-the-Shelf Package Implementation or In-House Software Development)?

For as long as we can remember, organizations have grappled with the issue of buying versus building. In our context, this remains something to consider because, despite the renewal in in-house software development using Lean and Agile, there still remains the question of whether you should buy or you should build, due precisely to the lack of success companies have had in deploying Agile on a large scale to the entire IT department.

Even though two of us are authors of published books on Agile project management, such as Business-Driven IT-Wide Implementation of Agile (Scrum) and Kanban (Lean),¹ our belief as of today is that, whenever ...