Success management as a PM knowledge area – work-in-progress

It is a fact that an organization's success is closely linked with its projects’ success. Although there are many studies in literature that focus on different aspects of project success like, for instance, the success factors or the criteria for success assessment, there are only few studies that mention the processes required for success evaluation. Guides and standards, such as the PMBOK 5 or ISO 21500:2012, are not exceptions to this reality. Given the high importance and complexity of the evaluation of the projects’ success, in this work-in-progress the Success Management is proposed as a new knowledge area of project management, as well as a set of processes to be carried out in its scop

Challenges In Transitioning From Waterfall To Scrum

In today\u27s fast-paced, fiercely competitive world; speed and flexibility are essential. Companies are increasingly realizing that the sequential approach to developing new product simply will not get the job done. The goal of this thesis is to investigate critical issues and challenges that occur during the transition from a traditional software development methodology such as Waterfall to Scrum. During the last decade, Scrum has gained a vast success in software development due to its lightweight character and efficient way of handling the challenges of increased market speed, change and product complexity. This thesis is based on a sequential exploratory mixed methods research model, which uses both qualitative as well as quantitative research methods to investigate the problem. The rationale for this is that neither method is sufficient by itself to capture the trends and details of situations. When used in combination, both quantitative and qualitative methods complement each other and provide a more complete picture of the research problem. There are six main results from this thesis. First the main challenges are identified. Second, they are ranked based on their frequency of occurrence and thirdly, based on their importance. Fourth, the correlation between the frequency of occurrence of challenge and their importance is measured. This thesis also examines the varied perspectives of Scrum Coaches and Scrum Practitioners regarding the frequency of challenges as the fifth result and regarding the importance of challenges as the sixth result

Proposta de um conjunto de competências para um time ágil

Monografia (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade UnB Gama, Curso de Engenharia de Software, 2014.O desenvolvimento ágil de software apoiado pelo Manifesto Ágil surge como uma reação à engenharia de software tradicional. Como alicerce desse desenvolvimento, as metodologias ágeis suportam a aplicação e utilização dessa abordagem, seguindo os princípios e valores que ela prega. Essas metodologias atribuem novas características ao grupo de pessoas que irá desempenhar suas atividades através dela, sendo denominado por elas como equipe ágil. O time ágil, por fazer parte dessa equipe, herda essas qualidades e é quem mais as utiliza para realizar seu trabalho. Alguns livros, artigos e guias de métodos ágeis afirmam que o time ágil deve ter todas as competências necessárias para completar o trabalho sem depender de pessoas de fora desse time, mas nenhum deles mencionam quantas e quais são essas competências. Diante disso, este trabalho busca definir e validar um conjunto de competências iniciais para um time ágil. Para atingir esse propósito, foi realizado um levantamento bibliográfico por meio de uma revisão sistemática para identificar e conhecer as características de um time ágil e a escolha de um conceito de competência para ser utilizado. Um questionário foi elaborado para avaliar a importância das competências e produziu como resultados um ranking de competências baseado na importância dada pelos respondentes a cada umas delas, sendo constituído por 29 competências.The agile software development supported by the Agile Manifesto arises as a reaction to traditional software engineering. As the basis of this development, agile methodologies support the application and use of this approach, following the principles and values that it preaches. These methodologies bring new characteristics to the group of people who will perform their activities through it, being termed as agile team. Some books, articles and guides of agile methods claim that agile team must have the competences necessary to complete the work without relying on people outside of this team, but none of them mention how many and what are these competences. Thus, this work seeks to define and validate a set of initial competences to an agile team. To achieve this purpose, we carried out a literature through a systematic review to identify and understand the characteristics of an agile team and choosing a concept of competence to be used. A questionnaire was designed to assess the importance of competences and as a result produced a ranking of competences based on the importance given by respondents to each one of them, consisting of 29 competences

Knowledge management in learning software SMMEs in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Doctor of Philosophy in Information Studies. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2017.The study investigated the nature and causes of software development failures and knowledge management practices adopted to mitigate the failures in small, micro, and medium software developing enterprises (SMMEs) in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The study adopted an interpretive, qualitative multiple case study approach to investigate the problem. Twelve software development SMMEs were involved in the study. Interviews were conducted with 12 information technology (IT)/software development project managers and eight software developers identified through purposive sampling. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse and interpret the data. The findings reveal that software development SMMEs in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, experience software development failures. Ten causes of failure were identified. They are bureaucracy in IT departments, compatibility issues, complacency of developers, involvement of the wrong people in the planning stages of projects, a lack of detailed documentation, lack of resources, lack of user commitment/non-adoption of systems, miscommunication/misrepresentation of requirements, unrealistic customer expectations, and work overload. The results also indicate that software organisations and individual software developers experience knowledge gaps during the course of their work. Six knowledge management practices are adopted by the organisations and the individual developers to fill the knowledge gaps. The practices are knowledge acquisition, creation, storage, sharing, organisation and application. These practices are supported by Internet technologies such as blogs, Wikis, search engines, social networks, organisational databases and computer hardware such as servers and personal computers. The study reveals two important knowledge management practices that are ignored by software organisations, namely post-mortem reviews, which are essential in software development, and formal training of the developers. The findings further reveal that knowledge management has enabled the organisations and individual developers to save time, retain their intellectual property (IP), become more efficient and effective in knowledge reuse. Organisations face a number of knowledge management related challenges. The challenges are lack of formal knowledge management procedures, difficulty protecting knowledge, expensive knowledge storage costs, increasing information needs, lack of the time to fully adopt knowledge management practices, difficulty finding information, and the ever-changing nature of knowledge. The study concluded that software development failures are prevalent in software SMMEs and that the organisations have informally adopted knowledge management. Moreover, knowledge management has brought benefits to the organisations but the role played by knowledge management in eliminating project failures is not clear. It is recommended that software organisations should consider formally adopting knowledge management so that knowledge management specialists can be employed to drive the knowledge management initiatives and so help in conducting post-mortem reviews and the training of staff. In addition, further research is recommended to investigate the role of knowledge management in reducing or eliminating software project failures. Quantitative studies are also recommended to objectively measure the benefits brought by knowledge management. Such studies would measure how much time and which costs are saved by adopting knowledge management. The study contributes to theory and practice (software development industry). Theoretically, the study developed and used a conceptual framework developed from software engineering and knowledge management that could be used to investigate knowledge management activities in organisations. The study also contributes to the existing body of knowledge on the subject software learning organisations from a developing country perspective. It is envisaged that software development organisations will adopt the recommendations proffered to improve their knowledge management practices