Coordinating Knowledge Work in Multi-Team Programs: Findings from a Large-Scale Agile Development Program

Software development projects have undergone remarkable changes with the arrival of agile development methods. While intended for small, self-managing teams, these methods are increasingly used also for large development programs. A major challenge in programs is to coordinate the work of many teams, due to high uncertainty in tasks, a high degree of interdependence between tasks and because of the large number of people involved. This revelatory case study focuses on how knowledge work is coordinated in large-scale agile development programs by providing a rich description of the coordination practices used and how these practices change over time in a four year development program with 12 development teams. The main findings highlight the role of coordination modes based on feedback, the use of a number of mechanisms far beyond what is described in practitioner advice, and finally how coordination practices change over time. The findings are important to improve the outcome of large knowledge-based development programs by tailoring coordination practices to needs and ensuring adjustment over time.Comment: To appear in Project Management Journa

The Mirroring Hypothesis: Theory, Evidence and Exceptions

The mirroring hypothesis predicts that the organizational patterns of a development project (e.g. communication links, geographic collocation, team and firm co-membership) will correspond to the technical patterns of dependency in the system under development. Scholars in a range of disciplines have argued that mirroring is either necessary or a highly desirable feature of development projects, but evidence pertaining to the hypothesis is widely scattered across fields, research sites, and methodologies. In this paper, we formally define the mirroring hypothesis and review 102 empirical studies spanning three levels of organization: within a single firm, across firms, and in open community-based development projects. The hypothesis was supported in 69% of the cases. Support for the hypothesis was strongest in the within-firm sample, less strong in the across-firm sample, and relatively weak in the open collaborative sample. Based on a detailed analysis of the cases in which the mirroring hypothesis was not supported, we introduce the concept of actionable transparency as a means of achieving coordination without mirroring. We present examples from practice and describe the more complex organizational patterns that emerge when actionable transparency allows designers to 'break the mirror.'Modularity, innovation, product and process development, organization design, design structure, organizational structure, organizational ties

Intense Collaboration In Globally Distributed Teams: Evolving Patterns Of Dependencies And Coordination

As multi-national firms and major offshore outsourcing companies develop experience with global work, their globally distributed teams face the challenge of collaborating intensely without the common interaction advantages associated with collocated work. This chapter analyzes the sources of intense collaboration. It then introduces strategies that organizations have developed to reduce the intensity of collaboration (sequentializing work, using mediating artifacts, modularity), or to enable intense teamwork (real time contact, boundary spanners). Strategy properties and deployment opportunities and constraints are indicated in order to equip managers and researchers with a framework for handling or analyzing globally distributed teamwork

The Impact Of Economic And Social Orientation On Trust Within Teams

In this paper, we develop a model to examine the impact of an individual’s economic and social orientation and the congruence of such orientations across the trustor-trusted dyad on the level of dyadic trust within a team.  The model explicitly accounts for higher order dependencies in trust among team members and the potential reciprocity in trust between members of a dyad.  The results from our model estimation provide evidence that congruence in economic and social orientation is an important antecedent of dyadic trust.  We also find that dyadic trust is characterized by higher order dependencies among team members; however, we do not find that trust is characterized by reciprocity.  We also find a wide variation in the polarization in teams based on the levels of trust among their members.  Taken together, these findings highlight the need to account for higher order dependencies in the study of trust in teams

Collaborative Working Environments : Group Needs Approach to Designing Systems for Supporting Spatially Distributed Groups

Collaboration in spatially distributed groups requires technological support for mediating collaborative activities and members’ interactions over time and distance. Technology provides multiple tools for supporting individual, social and task requirements of collaborative groups. Nevertheless, many aspects of computer-mediated interactions are not sufficiently explained and creating an effective computer-supported environment for collaborative groups as a combination of these tools remains a challenge. Meeting this challenge requires taking into consideration different aspects of collaborative interactions from both social and technological perspectives. This thesis discusses the social and technical aspects of collaboration in spatially distributed groups and introduces a design approach for collaborative working environments. Firstly, it presents a comprehensive overview of research on collaborative groups, summarizing three interrelated elements under the umbrella of the group needs approach: individual, task and group maintenance needs. Secondly, it proposes a design approach for collaborative working environments on the basis of group needs and thus presents an alternative for designing computer-supported environment for collaborative groups. This research considers two main types of systems for supporting collaborative groups – groupware and social software – and discusses functionalities originating from these systems. It introduces the Quality Function Deployment method and utilizes its House of Quality concept in order to develop and initially evaluate the First-Stage Prototype – the prototypical implementation of the collaborative working environment combining these two main types. The presented framework is used as a benchmarking tool on the basis of which selected existing platforms for supporting collaboration are evaluated. This research contributes to the area of the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and discusses actual trends in development of collaborative systems related to the application of new social tools for purposes of computer-supported collaboration.Kollaborative Arbeitsumgebungen – der Gruppenbedürfnisansatz zur Entwicklung von Systemen für die Unterstützung räumlich verteilter Gruppen Die Zusammenarbeit in räumlich verteilten Gruppen erfordert technologische Unterstützung um Interaktionen innerhalb der Gruppen über Zeit und Distanz zu ermöglichen. Dabei bieten heutige Technologien verschiedene Tools zur Unterstützung von individuellen, sozialen und aufgabenorientierten Anforderungen der Gruppen. Allerdings sind viele Aspekte von computervermittelten Interaktionen nicht ausreichend erforscht und die Gestaltung von effektiven computerunterstützten Umgebungen für zusammenarbeitende Gruppen als eine Kombination dieser Tools bleibt eine Herausforderung. Die Erfüllung dieser Anforderungen erfordert die Berücksichtigung unterschiedlicher Aspekte der Gruppeninteraktionen sowohl aus sozialer als auch aus technologischer Perspektive. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die sozialen und technischen Aspekte der Zusammenarbeit in räumlich verteilten Gruppen und präsentiert einen Entwicklungsansatz für Systeme zur Unterstützung der Zusammenarbeit. Zum einen gibt sie einen umfassenden Überblick über den aktuellen Forschungsstand zum Thema kooperative Gruppen und fasst dabei die drei verbundenen Elemente individuelle Bedürfnisse, Aufgabenbedürfnisse und Bedürfnisse zur Aufrechterhaltung der Gruppen unter dem Dach des Gruppenbedürfnisansatzes zusammen. Zum anderen präsentiert die Arbeit ein Entwicklungskonzept für kooperative Arbeitsumgebungen auf Grundlage dieses Ansatzes und somit eine Alternative für die Gestaltung von computerunterstützten Umgebungen für kollaborative Gruppen. Für diese Forschungsarbeit werden im Wesentlichen zwei Arten von Systemen sowie deren Funktionalitäten zur Unterstützung von kollaborativen Gruppen diskutiert – Groupware und Social Software. Um eine prototypische Implementierung einer kollaborativen Arbeitsumgebung zu entwickeln und eine erste Evaluation durchzuführen, wird die Quality Function Deployment Methode und das damit verbundene House of Quality Konzept verwendet. Die Forschungsergebnisse leisten einen Beitrag auf dem Gebiet der computerunterstützten Gruppenarbeit (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) und diskutieren aktuelle Trends im Bereich der Entwicklung kollaborativer Arbeitsumgebungen, die sich mit der Integration von neuen sozialen Tools zum Zweck computerunterstützter Zusammenarbeit beschäftigen

Coordination In Large Agile Projects

Faced with rapid changes in technology and business environments, more and more information technology (IT) practitioners and researchers are advocating agile methods, which aim to increase customer satisfaction, eliminate waste, accelerate the development process, and lower defects rates. Agile methods, which initially were aimed at small projects, face several challenges when applied to large software projects, however. Concentrating on the challenges of coordinating large agile projects, this study identifies three dimensions of coordination--decision-making structure, communication, and control—and proposes a research framework and a set of propositions to address coordination challenges in large agile projects. Three published case studies are used to illustrate and strengthen the propositions

Distributed Learning from Interactions in Social Networks

We consider a network scenario in which agents can evaluate each other according to a score graph that models some interactions. The goal is to design a distributed protocol, run by the agents, that allows them to learn their unknown state among a finite set of possible values. We propose a Bayesian framework in which scores and states are associated to probabilistic events with unknown parameters and hyperparameters, respectively. We show that each agent can learn its state by means of a local Bayesian classifier and a (centralized) Maximum-Likelihood (ML) estimator of parameter-hyperparameter that combines plain ML and Empirical Bayes approaches. By using tools from graphical models, which allow us to gain insight on conditional dependencies of scores and states, we provide a relaxed probabilistic model that ultimately leads to a parameter-hyperparameter estimator amenable to distributed computation. To highlight the appropriateness of the proposed relaxation, we demonstrate the distributed estimators on a social interaction set-up for user profiling.Comment: This submission is a shorter work (for conference publication) of a more comprehensive paper, already submitted as arXiv:1706.04081 (under review for journal publication). In this short submission only one social set-up is considered and only one of the relaxed estimators is proposed. Moreover, the exhaustive analysis, carried out in the longer manuscript, is completely missing in this versio