Challenging the AgileFall Budgeting-Trap: Applying the Continuous Planning and Forecasting Framework (CPFF)

In times of uncertainty, companies need to act quickly and respond to the market accordingly. Therefore, flexibility in the organization is a necessary prerequisite, whereby the budget plays a decisive role. Under the aspect of making budgeting as agile as possible, the Continuous Planning and Forecasting Framework (CPFF), from Dilger et al. (Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on information technology education. ACM, pp. 371–377, 2020) was developed. This framework proposed flexibility and at the same time shall help limiting the risk by granting room for maneuver being based on the beyond budgeting principles. A waterscrum/agilefall-led practice environment is seen as a use case for establishing the CPFF. Waterscrum/agilefall represents a mixture of waterfall- and agile software development. This paper addresses the question to what extent the framework can be implemented in such an environment. To answer the research question, a case study according to Yin (Case study research and applications: design and methods, 2018) was conducted, where, in addition to participant observations, the main component of information was generated from interviews with the employees of the departments under review. Continuous evaluation was performed on the one hand through constant participation in the meetings, and on the other hand with targeted interviews to gather information and in the end interviews with all employees receiving broad feedback. The agilefall-led department faces the challenge of meeting a traditional budgeting and agile project management. Thereby, the theoretical guidelines coincide with the assessments of the manager and the employees to a large extent, which refers to the application of the beyond budgeting principles in practice. According to the results, an implementation is possible under certain limitations, whereby the development of the leadership principles and management processes on a company basis still requires action, if all the principles and processes mentioned are to be implemented in a suitable way.