The design stage, which deals with the technical issues of how to satisfy the systems requirements, is typically dominated by concerns about what is technically feasible. As a result, the technical-factor portion, which constitutes the majority of the factors in this category, plays a more critical role in the activities of the design stage than in the requirements stage. The sociatechnical factors are thus seen to be criti cal in tackling problems related to the design of the systems of the respec tive projects. Issues dealing with the project-team composition, technical expertise, and technology infrastructure of the organization are central to the satisfactory resolution of design issues associated with the entire development process. The influence of the social dimension of the sociotechnical-factor category tends to diminish as the development process moves forward to the implementation stage.

The implementation stage deals more with the construction and testing of the designed systems, and with the integration of completed subsys tems. The role of the project goals and objectives and changing require ments ideally should be quite limited at this later stage of the systems development process if the project is to be completed successfully. Any unresolved problems dealing with the scope of the project or its specifi cations cannot be responsibly addressed at this late stage in the devel opment life cycle without severe delays in the schedule and possible increases in the estimated costs. Still, the dominance of the sociotechni cal factors must not be discounted at the implementation stage because the issues that have a critical impact on the viability of the development process are fundamentally technical and technological. For example, the level of technical expertise and experience of the development team and project leadership combine with the available technical infrastru

Con sequently, the collective impact of the sociotechnical-factor category is deemed critical to the implementation success of the systems develop ment process.

Conclusion In this chapter we have reviewed the technical and technological factors identified in published studies and discussed how they contribute to the abandonment of software projects. We have shown how each of the tech nical factors in the sociotechnical category can influence the outcomes of software projects. We have analyzed the critical impact of each tech nical factor on each project case presented in chapter 4. Finally, we have discussed the collective impact the technical factors generally have on the requirements, design, and implementation phases of the systems devel opment process, using the framework presented in chapter 3 to illustrate the significant role the factors can play in the entire software develop ment process.