Project Establishment in the Context of Participatory Design: Experience from a Hospital Information System Development Project in a Developing Country

This paper reports on a project establishment undertaking as proposed by the STEPS methodology (Software Technology for Evolutionary Participatory System Design). Project establishment in STEPS is aimed at getting an inner understanding of a project’s environment. This understanding spans getting insights about the user environment, establishing a project team and ends with an initial proposal of the next steps as proposed by STEPS. We describe the methodology we applied: sustained individual and group interactions with the staff at the hospital informed by concepts of participation, collaboration and Joint Applications Design. By reflecting on selected instances of our engagement with the hospital staff, we report as findings the observations that before our project ideas can get ground, there are preliminary reviews and concerns (auxiliary to the central theme of participation) that need to be addressed. They touch on tools, processes and the prevailing organizational culture. The task at hand evolved to be that of cultivating a ‘participatory culture’ on the hospital staff. At the end of the paper we present an outlook from our project establishment experience. We argue that our experiences as described in the paper inform our next steps. We frame our experiences into literature on: a) Power distance dimension in describing national cultures, b) empowerment and democracy in the practice of participatory design and c) incremental system development that proceeds from first defining a core system.