Using Case Survey Methodology to Extract Variables and Causal Links: An Example from Studying Business Process Change

Business process change (BPC) projects are complex initiatives with many interrelated factors that still cause unforeseen delays and even cancellations. While research on BPC provides useful insights into successes and failures of BPC projects, we argue that these insights remain rather fragmented. We present a multi-method approach to create a coherent picture by extracting variables and causal links within BPC projects. We do so by adopting case survey methodology and causal loop diagrams. We show the usefulness of this approach by analyzing and consolidating insights of 130 BPC case studies. We make two main contributions: (1) we show the potential of system dynamics in BPC research by integrating the fragmented research on BPC to achieve more coherent picture, and (2) we contribute to the literature on qualitative methods used in system dynamics, as we propose to use case survey methodology for developing causal loop diagrams.