Strategies Small Business Owners Use for Long-Term Existence

More than 90 of every 100 new businesses fail within 5 years. The need to explore ongoing strategies that provide low-cost alternatives can prove invaluable to cash-strapped new business owners. Exploration of relationships among a group of stakeholders essential to business success provided data in this case study. Those stakeholders include the owner, the customer service personnel and the consumer. Without the consumer, all other business activities would cease to be necessary. Five business owners and five employees from Redding, California participated in 2 separate focus group interviews. The conceptual framework for this case study was to explore the specific business problem, the lack of low-cost strategic resources, and initiatives to facilitate continued existence of new small businesses. The focus group interviews were conducted in 2 separate settings using notes and Audacity voice recordings. Through personal notes and the use of NVivo 11 data was disseminated and provided rich information on at least four themes. Major themes were customer retention, creating teamwork, building relationships, and communication to create business sustainability. Having communities in which businesses thrive allows for greater job opportunities and increased community revenue. The impact of empty storefronts in cities throughout America and the loss of community identity necessitate the need for the strategist to continue to attempt to provide resources and strategies to business owners everywhere. The social change impact occurs when SBOs who recognize their business provides structure to the community seek out ways to increase sustainability

Collaboration Strategies to Reduce Technical Debt

Inadequate software development collaboration processes can allow technical debt to accumulate increasing future maintenance costs and the chance of system failures. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore collaboration strategies software development leaders use to reduce the amount of technical debt created by software developers. The study population was software development leaders experienced with collaboration and technical debt at a large health care provider in the state of California. The data collection process included interviews with 8 software development leaders and reviewing 19 organizational documents relating to software development methods. The extended technology acceptance model was used as the conceptual framework to better understand the social and cognitive influences on the perceived usefulness of collaboration in reducing technical debt. An inductive analysis of the data was used for coding, triangulation, and identifying themes related to the use of collaboration strategies to reduce technical debt. Prominent themes included using collaboration at all stages of development, using continuous verification processes, promoting a participatory culture, and using tools to support distributed teams. The study findings showed an environment that promotes collaboration, a culture that encourages participation, and accessibility to collaborative tools that may reduce technical debt in software projects. The results of this study may contribute to positive social change by demonstrating how individuals with diverse backgrounds and different perspectives can work together to improve critical software that people depend on every day