FIT FOR THE FUTURE - MODERNISATION OF MASTER CURRICULUM IN ICT FOR ENHANCING STUDENT EMPLOYABILITY IN BELARUS

The Belarusian ICT industry grows fast, but the full potential has not been reached yet. To increase the ICT industry’s position as a central soil for the Belarusian economy, factors that hinder further growth, need to be identified and improved. Two of such factors are the inefficient dialogue between the ICT industry and higher education and a rather passive role of universities in framing trends on the market. This paper describes the concept and the implementation plan of the Erasmus+-project “Modernisation of Master Curriculum in ICT for Enhancing Student Employability in Belarus” (MaCICT). MaCICT is aimed to enhance the employability of ICT master students, foster entrepreneurship and establishment of SMEs in the ICT industry, and to upscale the position of higher education. For this, MaCICT updates the ICT study programmes to become more labor market and society oriented, practice-based, and student-centered. This forces universities to combine the traditional professional skills and competencies with soft and transferable skills and to focus more on multidisciplinary studies and internationalization of the study environment

Enterprise agility: A Balancing Act - a local government case study

Austerity and financial constraints have been threatening the public sector in the UK for a number of years. Foreseeing the threat of continued budget cuts, and addressing the situation many local councils face, requires internal transformations for financial stability without losing the key focus on public service. Agile transformations have been undertaken by organisations wanting to learn from the software development community and bringing agile principles into the wider organisation. This paper describes and analyses an ongoing behaviour-led transformation in a district council in the UK. It presents the results of the analysis of 19 interviews with internal stakeholders at the council, of observations of meetings among senior and middle management in a five-month period. The paper explores the successes and the challenges encountered towards the end of the transformation process and reflects on balancing acts to address the challenges, be-tween: disruption and business as usual, empowerment and goal setting, autonomy and processes and procedures, and behaviours and skills. Based on our findings, we suggest that behaviours on their own cannot guarantee a sustained agile culture, and that this is equally important for enterprise agility and for large-scale agile software development transformations

Inter-team Coordination in Large-Scale Agile Development: A Case Study of Three Enabling Mechanisms

Agile methods are increasingly used in large development projects, with multiple development teams. A central question is then what is needed to coordinate feature teams efficiently. This study exam- ines three mechanisms for coordination: Shared mental models, commu- nication and trust in a large-scale development project with 12 feature teams running over a four-year period. We analyse the findings in rela- tion to suggested frameworks for large-scale agile development and a theory on coordination, and provide new recommendations for practice and theory.Inter-team Coordination in Large-Scale Agile Development: A Case Study of Three Enabling MechanismspublishedVersio

A Canvas for Establishing Global Software Development Collaborations

Jufo-id:80620There is an increasing need and interest for organizations to collaborate with internal and external partners on a global scale for creating software-based products and services. Potential risks and different strategies need to be addressed when setting up such collaborations. Aspects such as cultural and social features, coordination, infrastructure, organizational change processes, or communication issues need to be con- sidered. Although there are already experiences available with respect to setting up global collaborations, they mainly focus on specific areas. It is dicult for companies to quickly assess if they have considered all rele- vant aspects. An overall aid that guides companies in systematically setting up global collaborations is widely missing. In this paper we present a study based on the snowballing method as a systematic approach to literature review. Based on this literature review and inputs from indus- try we investigated what aspects and practices need to be considered when establishing global software development collaborations and how to prioritize them. Based on that we created activity roadmaps that aggregate existing experiences. Reported experiences were structured into nine main aspects each containing extracted successful practices for set- ting up global software development collaborations. As a result we came up with an initial version of a canvas that is proposed as guidance for companies for setting up global collaborations in the software development domain.Peer reviewe

Towards an SNA-Based Framework for Educating Future Global Leaders

This paper investigates social network analysis as a method to assess the performance of a community-based learning process for educating future global leaders. Our framework is based on a distributed course for optimizing online communication behavior through social network analysis, which has been taught repeatedly to business (administration?), information systems and MBA students. These students come from geographically distant universities with different languages and cultures. They never meet face to face, but form virtual interdisciplinary teams collaborating on a common task. The course teaches three goals: (1) Students become more innovative by experiencing the power of “swarm creativity”. They form a collaborative innovation network (COIN) to engage in trusting and focused-collaboration in cyberteams to reach a shared goal. (2) Students improve communication skills in a virtual world by learning to make better use of electronic communication channels such as chat, skype, e-mail, wiki, and web-conferencing. (3) Students become better collaborators across different cultures and geographies by working together with peers from other countries and other mother tongues. Our study permitted us to obtain preliminary results on correlating temporal online communication patterns with team performance by collecting interaction data from e-mail, skype, web-conferencing, and face-to-face meetings. Performance is measured by correlating traditional network performance metrics such as betweenness and density, achievement of the course objectives through peer evaluation, and development of leadership personality characteristics. Our final goal is the development of guidelines to assess a learning organization focused on managerial competencies development