NON-TECHNICAL COMPETENCIES REQUIRED FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROFESSIONALS: HOW TO EFFECTIVELY INTERACT WITH CLIENTS/USERS

After considering reasons for developing the competencies of information technology (IT) professionals, so me of their key non-technical competencies are identified and discussed. Focusing on competence in their communicative interactions, results are presented from a survey which was performed to identify specific components of competence in interaction with clients/users. A total of 150 traits was evaluated by 424 IT professionals. Four factors have been found to contribute lo competence in interaction with clients/users: (1) work effectiveness; (2) productive information exchange; (3) agreeableness; and (4) sales related characteristics. Results are interpreted in relation to the demands of the professional environment of IT personnel

Development of a framework to understand the factors that influence software productivity in agile teams

Productivity improvement in the software industry is one of the major challenges facing many software development companies in this century. Most companies have adopted agile methodologies in order to profit from the benefits claimed for them. Agile methodologies are characterised by frequent software delivery, short feedback loops, quicker response to change, and problem identification earlier in the development process. The agile approach has been recognised as paving a way for companies to acquire higher software productivity, delivering good-quality and cost-effective software, enabling software development companies to respond to business challenges with their demands for high quality, high performance and high development speed in delivering the final product. For companies that adopt agile methodologies, understanding the factors that influence their teams’ software development productivity is a challenging task for management and practitioners today. In this research, an analysis is presented that identifies productivity factors that affect agile teams. It is a study of agile methods to identify common agile practices and/or values that have impact on productivity, and describes suitable metrics that could be used to measure agile team productivity. A qualitative research approach was used, and the case study was chosen as the research strategy. Two South African companies that are located in two different provinces and that adopted agile methodologies in their software development, were selected for the case studies. Qualitative content analysis was used in the research to permit subjective interpretation of factors that influence agile team productivity, and to analyse to what extent these factors affected productivity. This research has shown that an understanding of the factors that influence an agile team’s productivity gives significant insight into the way agile teams work, motivates team members to work together, and leads to uniform metrics in tracking each team’s progress. The study indicates that tracking an agile team’s work and providing adequate tools needed to execute their tasks results in improving agile team productivity. It should be recognised that using metrics to measure performance in agile teams is helpful in creating a team’s culture and trust. In this study, it was found that the factors identified in both literature and case studies affected productivity in the two companies under study, both positively and negatively. The study also found that applying the correct metrics in assessing, analysing and reviewing an agile team’s performance is important when monitoring productivity. Successful software delivery is only possible if individuals are committed to their work, are provided with the necessary tools and have access to a stable working environment. In addition, individual factors such as knowledge, skills, abilities, personalities and experience should be considered when forming agile teams. Consideration of these factors will result in grouping people that are able to work together and achieve a common goal, which is important in improving productivity. A conceptual framework for agile team productivity was proposed. The discussion of the findings is presented in more detail in this research.School of ComputingM.Sc. (Computing

A Structured Systemic Framework for Software Development

The purpose of this research was to develop and apply a systems-based framework for the analysis of software development project performance. Software development project performance is measured at the project level; that is, cost, schedule, and product quality that affect the overall project. To date, most performance improvement efforts have been focused on individual processes within the overall software development system. Making improvements to sub-elements, processes, or sub-systems without regard for the overall project is a classic misbehavior entered into by practitioners who fail to use a holistic, systemic approach. Attempts to improve sub-system behavior are at odds with The Principle of Sub-optimization. (van Gigch, 1974) The traditional method of predicting software development project performance, in terms of sub-system performance is too restrictive. A new holistic, systemic view based on systems principles offers a more robust way to look at performance. This research addressed this gap in the systems and software body of knowledge by developing a generalizable and transportable framework for software project performance that is based on systems principles. A rigorous mixed-method research methodology, employing both inductive and case study methods, was used to develop and validate the framework. Two research questions were identified as integral to increasing the understanding of a systems-based framework. (1) How does systems theory apply to the analysis of software development project performance? (2) What results from the application of a systems-based analysis framework for analyzing performance on a software development project? Using Discoverers\u27 Induction (Whewell, 1858), a systems-based framework for the analysis of software development project performance was constructed, adding to the systems and software body of knowledge and substantiating a comprehensive and unambiguous theoretical construct for software development. Then, the framework was applied to two completed software development projects to support validation. The structured systemic framework shows significant promise for contribution to software practitioners by indicating future software development project performance. The research also made a contribution in the area of research methodologies by resurrecting William Whewell\u27s Discoverers\u27 Induction (1858) and furthering the use of the case study method in the engineering management and systems engineering domain, areas where their application has been very limited

Lean Product Development process structure and its effect on the performance of NPD projects

New product development (NPD) has a pivotal role in the industrial competition, and makes a basis for long‐term prosperity of companies. To survive in today's fast‐changing market environment, companies are always trying to improve the performance of their NPD projects, by implementing new approaches, such as Lean Product Development (LPD). Nevertheless, applying such approaches is not straightforward, mainly due to the high level of interdependency between development activities and the role of dynamic effects in the project performance. Understanding the combined effects of dynamic features, including feedback loops, time delays and nonlinear causal relationships, is the main step for achieving higher project performance. In this thesis, the dynamics of LPD process structure is investigated to find the ways it could affect the time, cost and quality performance of a development project. As there is no consensus about the definition of LPD among researchers in this filed, first through a comprehensive literature review different approaches to LPD are studied. Two major approaches for LPD are introduced based on the adaptation of lean manufacturing tools and techniques for optimizing NPD processes, or extracting LPD specific tools and techniques from Toyota Product Development System (TPDS). The second approach is proved to be more applicable, mainly due to fundamental differences between manufacturing and NPD environments, and the LPD process design based on TPDS is selected as the focal point for this research. The combination of Set‐Based approach to design and Concurrent Engineering in the form of SBCE is identified as the unique feature of LPD process structure which have been the topic of several researches in this field during past decade. Set‐based design approach calls for the higher number of iteration cycles at the front end of the projects, and is responsible for higher project effectiveness while increases the time and effort invested. On the other hand, concurrent engineering targets the project duration, and is an efficiency factor, but if not structured properly it could have an opposite effect through increasing the number of rework cycles. Although the performance of TPDS which is the best benchmark for LPD shows the positive effect of SBCE on the projects performance, the reasons behind it and the way through which two approaches could be structured to achieve the favourable results is not clear yet. In addition, while different types of new product development projects, based on VII their levels of complexity and innovation, are defined and executed in companies, it is not clear if SBCE approach has the same impact on all project types. To investigate the reasons behind the superiority of SBCE and its effects in different types of development projects the systems thinking approach is selected as the main research methodology to provide a holistic view on the development projects through looking on interdependencies between performance measures and process structure. System dynamics modelling is used as the research method, due to its capacity in modelling feedback loops and iteration and rework cycles, as underlying factors which determine the time, cost and quality performance in projects. The model is built based on verified structures for rework cycle and resource allocation as the platform for the model, and becomes more specific for the purpose of this research by adding structures related to the iteration cycles, number of initial concepts, and effect of project type. After passing the standard system dynamics validation tests, the model is calibrated using the historical project data from different projects in a major car manufacturing company. The calibrated and verified model then used for the policy analysis by defining different scenarios based on the number of iteration cycles during the conceptual design phase, number of initial concepts and the type of project. All types of projects show the improved performance metrics when moving towards the SBCE approach by increasing the number of iteration cycle. However, the degree of improvement for projects with higher levels of complexity is more profound. In addition, it is concluded for projects with the high level of complexity that increasing the number of initial concepts has the positive effect on all project performance measures. This research results have a methodological contribution by providing a method for rigorous representation of the impact of LPD process structure on projects performance through simulation. From the practical point of view, the developed model could be used by project managers as a guide for making informed decisions which guarantee the long‐term success of development projects

Characterising the relationship between practice and laboratory-based studies of designers for critical design situations

Experimental study of the designer plays a critical role in design research. However laboratory based study is often poorly compared and contrasted to practice, leading to a lack of uptake and subsequent research impact. The importance of addressing this issue is highlighted by its significant influence on design research and many related fields. As such the main aim of this work is to improve empirical design research by characterising the relationship between practice and laboratory-based studies for critical design situations. A review of the state of the art methods in design research and key related fields is reported. This highlights the importance and commonality of a set or core issues connected to the failure to effectively link study of practice and study in the laboratory. Further to this a technical review and scoping was carried out to establish the most efective capture strategy to be used when studying the designer empirically. Subsequently three studies are reported, forming a three point comparison between practice the laboratory (with student practitioners) and an intermediary case (a laboratory with practitioners) . Results from these studies contextualise the critical situations in practice and develop a detailed multi-level comparison between practice and the laboratory which was then validated with respect to a number of existing studies. The primary contribution of this thesis is the development of a detailed multi-level relationship between practice and the laboratory for critical design situations: information seeking, ideation and design review. The second key contribution is the development of a generic method for the empirical study of designers in varying contexts - allowing researchers to build on this work and more effectively link diverse studies together. The final key contribution of this work is the identification of a number of core methodological issues and mitigating techniques affecting both design research and its related fields.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The Slippery Path to Productivity Improvement

The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1109/52.526831Productivity tools simply aren't delivering increased productivity even when a project is managed "by the book". It is demonstrated that there may be more systemic, albeit counterintuitive, causes for the "productivity paradox". Specifically, the productivity potential of software engineering tools may be squandered not because organizations fail to institute the necessary managerial practices but because the software development environment is a complex social system that causes such practices to have unintended consequences. To support this view, the author uses a system dynamics microworld of the software development process to simulate the long term productivity trend in a a hypothetical project environment managed "by-the-book". The microworld lets the project team examine possible causes one by one through controlled experimentation and hence allows them to discern true causal relationships in a failed project. The results indicate productivity erosion was unintentionally accelerated by perfectly "good" planning and control practices