Managing Software Projects

Team Organisation and People Management

Lecture 3
People in the process
• People are an organisation’s most important assets.
• The tasks of a manager are essentially people-oriented. Unless there
is some understanding of people, management will be unsuccessful.
• Poor people management is an important contributor to project
failure.
People management factors
• Consistency
• Team members should all be treated in a comparable way without favourites or
discrimination.
• Respect
• Different team members have different skills and these differences should be respected.
• Inclusion
• Involve all team members and make sure that people’s views are considered.
• Honesty
• You should always be honest about what is going well and what is going badly in a project.
Selecting staff
• An important project management task is team selection.
• Information on selection comes from:
• Information provided by the candidates.
• Information gained by interviewing and talking with candidates.
• Recommendations and comments from other people who know or who have
worked with the candidates.
Lessons
• Managers in a company may not wish to lose people to a new project.
Part-time involvement may be inevitable.
• Skills such as UI design and hardware interfacing are in short supply.
• Recent graduates may not have specific skills but may be a way of
introducing new skills.
• Technical proficiency may be less important than social skills.
Staff selection factors 1
Application domain experienceFor a project to develop a su ccessful system, the
developers must understand the application domain. It is
essential that some members of a development team have
some domain experience.
Platform experience This may be significant if low-level programming is
involved. Otherwise, not usually a critical attribute.
Programming This is normally only significant for short duration projects
language experience where there is not enough time to learn a new language.
While learning a language itself is not difficult, it takes
several months to become proficient in using the associated
libraries and components.
Problem solving ability This is very important for software engineers who
constantly have to solve technical problems. However, it is
almost impossible to judge without knowing the work of
the potential team member.
Staff selection factors 2
Educational This may provide an indicator of the basic fundamentals that the
background candidate should know and of their ability to learn. This factor
becomes increasingly irrelevant as engineers gain experience
across a range of projects.
Communication This is important because of the need for project staff to
ability communicate orally and in writing with other engineers, managers
and customers.
Adaptability Adaptability may be judged by looking at the different types of
experience that candidates have had. This is a n important attribute
as it indicates an ability to learn.
Attitude Project staff should have a p ositive attitude to their work and
should be willing to learn new skills. This is an important attribute
but often very difficult to assess.
Personality This is an important attribute but difficult to assess. Candidates
must be reasonably compatible with other team members. No
particular type of personality is more or less suited to software
engineering.
Motivating people
• An important role of a manager is to motivate the people working on
a project.
• Motivation is a complex issue but it appears that their are different
types of motivation based on:
• Basic needs (e.g. food, sleep, etc.);
• Personal needs (e.g. respect, self-esteem);
• Social needs (e.g. to be accepted as part of a group).
Human needs hierarchy
Need satisfaction
• Social
• Provide communal facilities;
• Allow informal communications.
• Esteem
• Recognition of achievements;
• Appropriate rewards.
• Self-realization
• Training - people want to learn more;
• Responsibility.
Personality types
• The needs hierarchy is almost certainly an over-simplification of
motivation in practice.
• Motivation should also take into account different personality types:
• Task-oriented;
• Self-oriented;
• Interaction-oriented.
Personality types
• Task-oriented.
• The motivation for doing the work is the work itself;
• Self-oriented.
• The work is a means to an end which is the achievement of individual goals - e.g. to get rich,
to play tennis, to travel etc.;
• Interaction-oriented
• The principal motivation is the presence and actions of
co-workers. People go to work because they like to go to
work.
Different Work Personalities

3-13
Motivation balance
• Individual motivations are made up of elements
of each class.
• The balance can change depending on personal
circumstances and external events.
• However, people are not just motivated by personal factors but also by being part
of a group and culture.
• People go to work because they are motivated by the people that they work with.
Managing groups
• Most software engineering is a group activity
• The development schedule for most non-trivial software projects is such that
they cannot be completed by one person working alone.
• Group interaction is a key determinant of group performance.
• Flexibility in group composition is limited
• Managers must do the best they can with available people.
Factors influencing group working
• Group composition.
• Group cohesiveness.
• Group communications.
• Group organisation.
Group composition
• Group composed of members who share the
same motivation can be problematic
• Task-oriented - everyone wants to do their own thing;
• Self-oriented - everyone wants to be the boss;
• Interaction-oriented - too much chatting, not enough work.
• An effective group has a balance of all types.
• This can be difficult to achieve software engineers are often
task-oriented.
• Interaction-oriented people are very important as they can
detect and defuse tensions that arise.
Group leadership
• Leadership depends on respect not titular status.
• There may be both a technical and an administrative leader.
• Democratic leadership (is a type of leadership style in which members
of the group take a more participative role in the decision-making
process.) is more effective that
autocratic leadership.
Group cohesiveness
• In a cohesive group, members consider the group to be more
important than any individual in it.
• The advantages of a cohesive group are:
• Group quality standards can be developed;
• Group members work closely together so inhibitions caused by ignorance are
reduced;
• Team members learn from each other and get to know each other’s work;
• Egoless programming where members strive to improve each other’s
programs can be practised.
Developing cohesiveness
• Cohesiveness is influenced by factors such as the organisational culture and the
personalities in the group.
• Cohesiveness can be encouraged through
• Social events;
• Developing a group identity and territory;
• Explicit team-building activities.
• Openness with information is a simple way of ensuring all group members feel
part of the group.
Group loyalties
• Group members tend to be loyal to cohesive groups.
• 'Groupthink' is preservation of group
irrespective of technical or organizational
considerations.
• Management should act positively to avoid
groupthink by forcing external involvement with each group.
Group communications
• Good communications are essential for effective group working.
• Information must be exchanged on the status of work, design
decisions and changes to previous decisions.
• Good communications also strengthens group cohesion as it
promotes understanding.
 Group communications

• Group size
• The larger the group, the harder it is for people to communicate with other group members.
• Group structure
• Communication is better in informally structured groups than in hierarchically structured
groups.
• Group composition
• Communication is better when there are different personality types in a group and when
groups are mixed rather than single sex.
• The physical work environment
• Good workplace organisation can help encourage communications.
Group organisation
• Small software engineering groups are usually organised informally
without a rigid structure.
• For large projects, there may be a hierarchical structure where
different groups are responsible for different sub-projects.
Informal groups
• The group acts as a whole and comes to a consensus on decisions affecting the
system.
• The group leader serves as the external interface of the group but does not
allocate specific work items.
• Rather, work is discussed by the group as a whole and tasks are allocated
according to ability and experience.
• This approach is successful for groups where all members are experienced and
competent.
Extreme programming groups
• Extreme programming groups are variants of an informal, democratic
organisation.
• In extreme programming groups, some ‘management’ decisions are
devolved to group members.
• Programmers work in pairs and take a collective responsibility for
code that is developed.
Chief programmer teams
• Consist of a kernel of specialists helped by others added to the project as
required.
• The motivation behind their development is the wide difference in ability in
different programmers.
• Chief programmer teams provide a supporting environment for very able
programmers to be responsible for most of the system development.
Problems
• This chief programmer approach, in different forms, has been successful in some
settings.
• However, it suffers from a number of problems
• Talented designers and programmers are hard to find. Without exceptional people in these
roles, the approach will fail;
• Other group members may resent the chief programmer taking the credit for success so may
deliberately undermine his/her role;
• There is a high project risk as the project will fail if both the chief and deputy programmer are
unavailable.
• The organisational structures and grades in a company may be unable to accommodate this
type of group.
Working environments
• The physical workplace provision has an important
effect on individual productivity and satisfaction
• Comfort;
• Privacy;
• Facilities.
• Health and safety considerations must be taken
into account
• Lighting;
• Heating;
• Furniture.
Environmental factors
• Privacy - each engineer requires an area for
uninterrupted work.
• Outside awareness - people prefer to work in
natural light.
• Personalization - individuals adopt different
working practices and like to organize their
environment in different ways.
Project Team Development Stages

• Form
• Storm
• Norm
• Perform
• Adjourn

3-31
Forming
• Become familiar with fellow team member(s)

• Establish team goals

• Provide work assignments

3-32
Storming
• Set goals

• Establish power levels

• Identify leadership roles

3-33
Norming
• Build interpersonal relationships with team members

• Develop a common purpose for the project

• Develop standard operating procedures

3-34
Performing
• Start project work

• Stage ends when the project is completed

3-35
Adjourning
• Complete project assignments

• Team members are released from the project and

reassigned

• Different emotional reactions exhibited

3-36
The People Capability Maturity Model

• Intended as a framework for managing the development of people

involved in software development.
P-CMM Objectives
• To improve organisational capability by improving workforce
capability.
• To ensure that software development capability is not reliant on a
small number of individuals.
• To align the motivation of individuals with that of the organisation.
• To help retain people with critical knowledge and skills.
P-CMM levels
• Five stage model
• Initial. Ad-hoc people management
• Repeatable. Policies developed for capability improvement
• Defined. Standardised people management across the organisation
• Managed. Quantitative goals for people management in place
• Optimizing. Continuous focus on improving individual competence and workforce motivation
The people capability model
Optimizing
Continuously improve methods Continuous workforce innovation
for developing personal and Coaching
organisational competence Personal competency development

Mana ged
Quantitatively manage Organisational per formance alignment
organisational g row th in Organisational competency management
workforce capabilities and
establish competency-based Team-based practices
teams Team building
Mentoring

Defined
Identify primary
competencies and Participatory culture
align workforce Competency-based practices
activities with them
Career development
Competency development
Workforce planning
Knowledge and skills analysis

Repea ta ble
Instill basic
discipline into Compensation
workforce Training
activities Performance management
Staffing
Communication
Work environment

Initial