This study investigates the team aspects of a process improvement project situated in
an Internet banking system maintenance and modification phase. To investigate how
team processes could be improved in this context, four interventional change
techniques were introduced and implemented during an action research study in
which the researcher was included as one of the team members and participated
during group meetings and discussions.
Internet banking is an important Internet-delivered service which is expected to
provide benefits for both commercial banks and bank customers. Internet banking
allows bank customers to have the freedom to perform their financial activities at their
convenience. Developing, maintaining, and improving Internet banking systems
requires large amounts of investment to maintain high levels of Internet banking
service quality, and the maintenance and modification phase of the overall lifecycle
cost is a considerable part of this investment. Therefore, in order to ensure high levels
of usability, reliability, and quality for these Internet banking services, commercial
banks need to make significant investments in the maintenance and modification
phases of their Internet banking systems' lifecycle.
The four interventional change techniques used in this study were: departmental
participation, equal participation, holistic scenario, and management support. The four
techniques were found to be influential in developing process improvements in the
maintenance and modification phase of Internet banking systems. These techniques
generated several significant improvements which directly affected the way team
members managed their work. The significant contributions of these interventional
change techniques were: the creation of cross-functional multilevel teams,
development of effective departmental participation and communication techniques,
extended scope and knowledge by the team members of Internet banking systems, an
increase in team learning and understanding, techniques to change problem structure,
and an end to end problem-solving approach.
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These contributions also directly improved the performance of the Internet banking
systems maintenance team, and there was a significant improvement in the outcomes
of the Internet banking systems maintenance and modification phase.
