Significant attention has been paid to the improvement of system development practices. There are theories and methods that are to be used for such improvement purposes. The criticism towards these theories and methods is that many of them have a narrow focus on the system development process, methods, and tools. Too little attention is paid to business orientation, organisational aspects and social factors. In this paper we present a framework that goes beyond this narrow focus in order to serve as a support for directing focus during improvement of system development practices. The development of the framework has been driven by experiences derived from four action research projects focusing on the improvement of system development practices. Generated categories from these experiences have been validated theoretically and internally through a multi-grounded theory development process in order to arrive at a practical theory.