Model for Selecting Project Members to Minimize Project Uncertainties

Project risks come mainly from the future uncertainties, and new product and service development projects possess the most uncertainty and therefore the highest risk. However, if the project team has gained experiences from previous similar projects, the risk to the project drastically declines. In other words, an inverse correlation exists between member experiences and project risk. Therefore, the guiding principle would be to assign an experienced member to execute familiar work for that member. This study aims to establish a mathematical model that uses member experience to minimize project uncertainty. The nonlinear model assigns members with different experiences to the most suitable tasks to minimize project risk, and thus maximize project success rates under constraints of project costs and communication complexities. An experimental case is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model, and results indicated that under cost and communication complexity constraints, project uncertainty can truly be minimized by allocating an adequate member to the suitable task.     

软件项目费用风险混合评估方法

在软件工程领域摹于公式模型预测的结果往往并不比人的经验准确,然而基于经验的预测方法也存在不少问题.提出的软件项目费用风险评估方法基于专家知识经验和历史项目数据,综合利用功能点分析方法以统计或估箅项目的大小,建立了由专家评估预测费用超出的BN模型,由历史数据得到费用超出与生产力之间的关系,从而计算计划项目的生产力.进而估计项目的计划费用,通过对项目当前生产力与计划生产力的比较,评估项目当前是否存在费用风险.方法与费用预测模型无关,费用预算和项目最终实际费用以相对应的理想项目费用为参照物,与在不确定性费用预算基础上进行费用风险分析评估的方法相比,具有较高的可靠性.     

Group development in virtual teams: An experimental reexamination

Virtual teams are thought to be experienced differently and to have poor outcomes because there is little or no face-to-face interaction and a tendency for virtual team members to use different communication techniques for forming relationships. However, the expanding use of virtual teams in organizations suggests that virtual teams in real world contexts are able to overcome these barriers and be experienced in much the same way as face-to-face teams. This paper reports the result of an experiment in which virtual teams participated in an exercise where they completed an information-sharing task ten times as a team. The results suggest that, contrary to one-shot, ad hoc virtual teams, longer-lived virtual teams follow a sequential group development process. Virtual team development appears to differ from face-to-face teams because the use of computer-mediated communication heightens pressure to conform when a virtual team is first formed, meaning trust is most strongly linked with feeling that the team was accomplishing the task appropriately. As the virtual teams developed, trust in peers was more strongly linked with goal commitment. Once the teams were working together effectively, accomplishing the task appropriately was the strongest link with trust in peers. I suggest that virtual team managers should cultivate virtual workspaces that are similar to those proven to work in face-to-face contexts: (1) teams should have clear, specific goals, (2) members should be encouraged or even required to communicate with each other, and (3) team members should feel that they might work with the other team members again.     

论IT项目的人力资源管理

现代企业的核心竞争力往往是由企业所拥有的人力资源决定,而在软件开发这样的行业当中,人才的作用更是显得关键.人力资源管理是软件企业管理的核心工作.将人员合理的分配的各个开发团队中,在各个开发团队之间进行人员的协调是保证软件项目顺利完工的前提条件.如何充分发挥“人“的作用,对于项目的成败起着至关重要的作用.     

Antecedents and consequences of team potency in software development projects

Developing new software quickly, successfully, and at low cost is critical in organizations. Ways of assessing the effectiveness of development teams has highlighted measures of factors, such as teamwork, group cohesiveness, and team integration, but the use of group potency theory (the collective belief of a group that it can be effective) is rare. In our study, we investigated antecedents of and consequences to group potency in software development project teams. By examining 53 software development project teams collected from small and medium-sized software firms in Turkey, we found, that team potency positively affected speed-to-market, development cost, and market success of the product. We also found that trust among project team members, past experiences of the members, and team empowerment had a positive impact on the team potency during the project. Managerial and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Formal model for assigning human resources to teams in software projects

Context

Human resources play a critical role in software project success. However, people are still the least formalized factor in today’s process models. Generally, people are assigned to roles and project teams are formed on the basis of project leaders’ experience of people, constraints (e.g. availability) and skill requirements. Yet this process has to take multiple factors into account. Few works in the literature model this process. Most of these are informal proposals focusing on the individual assignment of people to project tasks and do not consider other aspects like team formation as a whole.

Objective

In this paper we formulate a formal model for assigning human resources to software project teams. Additionally, we describe the key results of the knowledge management process enacted to output the elements of the model.

Method

The model elements were identified using the Delphi expert consultation method and applying psychological tests. The proposed model was implemented in a software tool and validated on two software development organization assignment scenarios.

Results

We built a formal model for the process of assigning human resources to software project teams. This model takes into account as many factors as possible and aids the assignment of individuals to project roles, as well as the formation of the team as a whole.We found that the rules that were identified to form software development project teams are useful. From the tests we found that model implementation was feasible (all the executions of the implemented problem-solving algorithms output feasible solutions in response times that can be considered as acceptable).

Conclusion

Using the Delphi method we were able to propose software project roles and competences. Psychological tests and data mining tools identified useful rules for forming software project teams. These were used to build a formal model. This model was built into a tool that returns role assignments in acceptable response times. This decision support tool helps managers assign people to roles and to form teams. Using the tool, project leaders can flexibly evaluate different team make-ups, taking into account several factors, as well as different constraints and objectives.     

Building Effective Project Teams

Most IS managers know that managing a project to its successful completion is not an easy task. Conflicts among team members often delay a project's schedule and can ruin the team's morale. Although most managers usually follow the traditional, authoritative style of management to control their team members, this style is no longer considered as effective as the more contemporary, collaborative approach. This article describes how IS managers can manage their projects more effectively by creating collaborative project teams.     

基于超图的矩阵制企业项目小组超网络形成机制研究

在众多社会网络中,由于现实世界的普遍性,合作网络一直以来是网络研究的热点之一。在企业中,有一些工作需要以项目小组的形式由企业成员合作来完成,矩阵制企业项目小组就是一种特殊的合作网络。本文以某消费品公司的矩阵制企业项目小组结构为例,以职能部门的人员为节点,以项目小组作为超边,构建基于超图的矩阵制企业项目小组超网络拓扑结构,对所建的拓扑结构模型有关拓扑特性进行计算和分析。然后,从动态的角度对矩阵制企业项目小组进行研究,建立节点具有竞争力的矩阵制企业项目小组的非均齐超网络形成机制模型,体现了项目小组的变化和增加过程。通过分析发现矩阵制企业项目小组中存在多重领导,对人员的绩效考核与薪酬调整都会起到影响作用,本文的研究可以帮助理解自然界和社会中的很多合作网络的变化规律。     

Building Effective Project Teams

Most IS managers know that managing a project to its successful completion is not an easy task. Conflicts among team members often delay a project's schedule and can ruin the team's morale. Although most managers usually follow the traditional, authoritative style of management to control their team members, this style is no longer considered as effective as the more contemporary, collaborative approach. This article describes how IS managers can manage their projects more effectively by creating collaborative project teams.     

Understanding the Benefits and Detriments of Conflict on Team Creativity Process

Intra‐team conflict research has shown the different effects of conflict on team output, but it has not fully addressed how conflict influences the team creativity process in different task types of project teams over the project life cycle. Conflict, project life cycle, and project types are important predictors of team creativity. This paper focuses on examining the degree of conflict that the different types of project teams experienced, and more specifically this paper seeks to understand the benefits and detriments of conflict on the team creativity process. Furthermore, this paper shows that the project life cycle is a significant moderator of the conflict‐creativity relationship in different project teams.     

Caramba—A Process-Aware Collaboration System Supporting Ad hoc and Collaborative Processes in Virtual Teams

Organizations increasingly define many business processes as projects executed by virtual (project) teams, where team members from within an organization cooperate with outside experts. Virtual teams require and enable people to collaborate across geographical distance and professional (organizational) boundaries and have a somewhat stable team configuration with roles and responsibilities assigned to team members. Different people, coming from different organizations will have their own preferences and experiences and cannot be expected to undergo a long learning cycle before participating in team activities. Thus, efficient communication, coordination, and process-aware collaboration remain a fundamental challenge. In this paper we discuss the current shortcomings of approaches in the light of virtual teamwork (mainly Workflow, Groupware, and Project Management) based on models and underlying metaphors. Furthermore, we present a novel approach for virtual teamwork by tightly integrating all associations between processes, artifacts, and resources. In this paper we analyze (a) the relevant criteria for process-aware collaboration system metaphors, (b) coordination models and constructs for organizational structures of virtual teams as well as for ad hoc and collaborative processes composed out of tasks, and (c) architectural considerations as well as design and implementation issues for an integrated process-aware collaboration system for virtual teams on the Internet.     

Guanxi Networks and Creativity in Taiwanese Project Teams

Personal connections, also called guanxi in Chinese culture, are embedded within a network of interdependent social exchanges, providing access to resources, information and supports, therefore facilitating performance. Building guanxi networks means building social networks. Project teams are commonly used as fundamental units in organizations, partly in order to generate more creative ideas, and so this paper evaluates how project teams use their guanxi networks within and outside of their teams and across boundaries to stimulate their creative performance. Fifty‐four product development project teams with 293 members from high‐tech Taiwanese firms participated in this study. Findings suggested that, in a guanxi culture such as Taiwan's, in order to facilitate a project team's creative performance, the most important task is to develop a more cohesive social unit before the team extends its external networks, since Chinese culture regards people first as members of groups, and secondly as individuals.     

From Aristotle to Ringelmann: a large-scale analysis of team productivity and coordination in Open Source Software projects

Complex software development projects rely on the contribution of teams of developers, who are required to collaborate and coordinate their efforts. The productivity of such development teams, i.e., how their size is related to the produced output, is an important consideration for project and schedule management as well as for cost estimation. The majority of studies in empirical software engineering suggest that - due to coordination overhead - teams of collaborating developers become less productive as they grow in size. This phenomenon is commonly paraphrased as Brooks’ law of software project management, which states that “adding manpower to a software project makes it later”. Outside software engineering, the non-additive scaling of productivity in teams is often referred to as the Ringelmann effect, which is studied extensively in social psychology and organizational theory. Conversely, a recent study suggested that in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, the productivity of developers increases as the team grows in size. Attributing it to collective synergetic effects, this surprising finding was linked to the Aristotelian quote that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”. Using a data set of 58 OSS projects with more than 580,000 commits contributed by more than 30,000 developers, in this article we provide a large-scale analysis of the relation between size and productivity of software development teams. Our findings confirm the negative relation between team size and productivity previously suggested by empirical software engineering research, thus providing quantitative evidence for the presence of a strong Ringelmann effect. Using fine-grained data on the association between developers and source code files, we investigate possible explanations for the observed relations between team size and productivity. In particular, we take a network perspective on developer-code associations in software development teams and show that the magnitude of the decrease in productivity is likely to be related to the growth dynamics of co-editing networks which can be interpreted as a first-order approximation of coordination requirements.     

A replicated quasi-experimental study on the influence of personality and team climate in software development

This article reports a replication of a quasi-experimental study analyzing how personality factors and team climate influence software development team effectiveness, product quality and team member satisfaction. The replication was designed on the basis of the original quasi-experimental study, both of which were run in an academic setting. In the original study, data were collected from a sample of 35 three-member developer teams. All these teams used an adaptation of extreme programming (XP) to the academic environment to develop the same software system. In the replication, the data were collected from a sample of 34 three- or four-member developer teams working on the same software project. Student teams used a common object-oriented software development paradigm to solve the set problem and applied the Unified Process. In both studies all teams were formed at random, and their members were blind to the quasi-experimental conditions and hypotheses. The replication of this empirical study aims to verify the results of the original quasi-experiment. It examines, first, whether personality factors (neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, openness to experience and conscientiousness) are related to the quality of the developed software and team member satisfaction and, second, whether the preferences, perceptions and preferences-perceptions fit for the four team climate factors (participative safety, support for innovation, team vision and task orientation) are related to the quality of the developed software and team member satisfaction. The results of the replication corroborate some of the findings of the original study. On the one hand, the results revealed that there is a significant correlation between the extroversion personality factor and software quality, but no significant correlation between the extroversion personality factor and team satisfaction. Also, we found that the perception of team climate where participative safety is high is related to better quality software. We observed significant relationships between the perception of the four team climate factors and team member satisfaction. Additionally, the results showed a positive relationship between software quality and teams in which the real climate perception at the end of the project is better than preferences stated by team members at the outset of the project for the participative safety factor. Finally, we found that teams where the real climate is better than the stated preferences for the team orientation factor exhibit a direct and positive relationship to team member satisfaction.     

Towards understanding the relationship between team climate and software quality—a quasi-experimental study

This paper describes an empirical study that examined the work climate within software development teams. The question was whether the team climate in software developer teams has any relation to software product quality. We define team climate as the shared perceptions of the team’s work procedures and practices. The team climate factors examined were West and Anderson’s participative safety, support for innovation, team vision and task orientation. These four factors were measured before the project using the Team Selection Inventory (TSI) test to establish subject climate preferences, as well as during and after the project using the Team Climate Inventory (TCI) test, which establishes the subject’s perceptions of the climate. In this quasi-experimental study, data were collected from a sample of 35 three-member developer teams in an academic setting. These teams were formed at random and their members were blind to the quasi-experimental conditions and hypotheses. All teams used an adaptation of extreme programming (XP) to the students’ environment to develop the same software system. We found that high team vision preferences and high participative safety perceptions of the team were significantly related to better software. Additionally, the results show that there is a positive relationship between the categorization of better than preferred, as preferred and worse than preferred climate and software quality for two of the teamwork climate factors: participative safety and team vision. So it seems important to track team climate in an organization and team as one (of many) indicators of the quality of the software to be delivered.

Knowledge sharing mechanisms and techniques in project teams: Literature review,classification, and current trends

Knowledge management is the process of capturing, sharing, developing, and using the knowledge efficiently. Knowledge sharing as one of the important parts of the knowledge management system means that an individual, team, and the organization share the knowledge with other members in the form of activities through the various ways. On the other hand, a project team is a team whose members usually belongs to different departments and are assigned to join the same project. In a project team, knowledge sharing is very important because it provides a link between the member and the project team by sharing knowledge to reduce cost and increase the performance. However, despite the importance of the knowledge sharing mechanisms and techniques in the project teams, to the best of our knowledge, the comprehensive and systematic research and study about the antecedents and backgrounds of knowledge sharing mechanisms between project teams is rare. Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to provide the comprehensive and detailed review of the state-of-the-art knowledge sharing mechanisms in the project team as well as directions for future research. Also, this paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) on the knowledge sharing mechanisms in project teams up to the end of 2015. We identified 71 papers, which are reduced to 28 primary studies through our paper selection process. By providing the state-of-the-art information and the challenges issues, this survey will directly support academics, researchers and practicing professionals in their understanding of developments in knowledge sharing mechanisms and techniques in project teams.     

Enabling knowledge diversity to benefit cross-functional project teams: Joint roles of knowledge leadership and transactive memory system

Team members’ knowledge diversity has a “double-edged sword” nature within cross-functional project teams (CFPTs), showing an inconsistent relationship with team performance. For realizing this diversity’s potential benefits, leadership is usually an essential enabler. However, little is known about how knowledge leadership achieves this. This study proposed that knowledge leadership moderates the effect of knowledge diversity on team performance through a transactive memory system (TMS). By empirically testing survey data from 96 CFPTs, we found that knowledge leadership enables a positive linkage of knowledge diversity-CFPT performance by successively breaking down barriers to communication and cooperation in TMS development and functioning.     

Project teaming: Knowledge-intensive design for composing team members

Enterprises frequently use project teams to perform various tasks. In a human-centered, highly collaborative environment, the importance of teamwork exceeds that of individual skill. Appropriate team composition is crucial to the success of ad-hoc teamwork, yet optimizing team composition is challenging. This study utilizes knowledge-intensive approaches to build project teaming models into ontologies. Furthermore, it helps develop a set of logic rules for identifying semantic relationships between individuals. By following a knowledge-base creation process, the factual data of project, workers, and teaming factors can be inserted into ontologies. Based on knowledge inference, reliable knowledge bases are established for selecting project team members in runtime. A case study is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design. Experimental lessons demonstrate that combining rules with ontological knowledge bases not only serves team composition needs, but also achieves knowledge base durability and system reliability.     

Are team personality and climate related to satisfaction and software quality? Aggregating results from a twice replicated experiment

ContextResearch into software engineering teams focuses on human and social team factors. Social psychology deals with the study of team formation and has found that personality factors and group processes such as team climate are related to team effectiveness. However, there are only a handful of empirical studies dealing with personality and team climate and their relationship to software development team effectiveness.ObjectiveWe present aggregate results of a twice replicated quasi-experiment that evaluates the relationships between personality, team climate, product quality and satisfaction in software development teams.MethodOur experimental study measures the personalities of team members based on the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) and team climate factors (participative safety, support for innovation, team vision and task orientation) preferences and perceptions. We aggregate the results of the three studies through a meta-analysis of correlations. The study was conducted with students.ResultsThe aggregation of results from the baseline experiment and two replications corroborates the following findings. There is a positive relationship between all four climate factors and satisfaction in software development teams. Teams whose members score highest for the agreeableness personality factor have the highest satisfaction levels. The results unveil a significant positive correlation between the extraversion personality factor and software product quality. High participative safety and task orientation climate perceptions are significantly related to quality.ConclusionsFirst, more efficient software development teams can be formed heeding personality factors like agreeableness and extraversion. Second, the team climate generated in software development teams should be monitored for team member satisfaction. Finally, aspects like people feeling safe giving their opinions or encouraging team members to work hard at their job can have an impact on software quality. Software project managers can take advantage of these factors to promote developer satisfaction and improve the resulting product.     

Effects of sleep loss on team decision making: motivational loss or motivational gain?

OBJECTIVE: To examine the effects of 30 hr of sleep loss and continuous cognitive work on performance in a distributed team decision-making environment. BACKGROUND: To date, only a few studies have examined the effect of sleep loss on distributed team performance, and only one other to our knowledge has examined the relationship between sleep loss and social-motivational aspects of teams (Hoeksema-van Orden, Gaillard, & Buunk, 1998). METHOD: Sixteen teams participated; each comprised 4 members. Three team members made threat assessments on a military surveillance task and then forwarded their judgments electronically to a team leader, who made a final assessment on behalf of the team. RESULTS: Sleep loss had an antagonistic effect on team decision-making accuracy and decision time. However, the performance loss associated with fatigue attributable to sleep loss was mediated by being part of a team, as compared with performing the same task individually - that is, we found evidence of a "motivational gain" effect in these sleepy teams. We compare these results with those of Hoeksema-van Orden et al. (1998), who found clear evidence of a "social loafing" effect in sleepy teams. CONCLUSION: The divergent results are discussed in the context of the collective effort model (Karau & Williams, 1993) and are attributable in part to a difference between independent and interdependent team tasks. APPLICATION: The issues and findings have implications for a wide range of distributed, collaborative work environments, such as military network-enabled operations.