Staffing in Software Projects

Introduction

•Main Concerns
In software development environment, when projects are implemented
by teams, 4 main concerns to be considered are
• Staff Selection
• Staff Development
• Staff Motivation
• Continued well-being staff during course of project
Introduction ‘Step Wise’ - an overview
0.Select
All concerns have impact at 1. Identify project 2. Identify project
all stages, but particularly project infrastructure
in step 1, 2, 6 & 7 objectives
3. Analyse
project Need to aware of
Some objectives can implications
address health and
characteristics
safety during projects
Review 4. Identify products
Activities can
and activities be set to enhance
staff motivation
5. Estimate effort
Lower level for activity For each
detail activity
6. Identify activity
risks Risk related to
staffing also
10. Lower level
7. Allocate
planning
resources
Staff qualities
should be taken
8. Review/ publicize into account
9. Execute plan plan during allocation
Understanding Behavior

• ‘Handling of people’ is an important aspect of project

management
2 approaches:
• Positivist approach
• Inter-pretivist approach
 Understanding Behavior
• Positivist approach
• Based on development of system
• Discipline of Organizational behavior theories
“If A is the situation then B is likely to result”
• Tends to be objective and empirical
• Seeks causes for behavior
• Conduct studies that can be generalized to larger populations
• Interpretivist approach
• More qualitative
• Based on smaller samples
• View each consumption situation as unique and non-predictive
• Look for common patterns across consumption situations
• The 2 viewpoints(positivist and interpretivist) are both valid and useful in
managing the people in software field.
 Organizational Behaviour(OB): A background
• Fredrick Taylor attempted to analyze the most productive way of
doing manual tasks.
• Taylor’s three basic objectives
• 1. To select the best man for the job.
• 2. To instruct them in the best methods.
• 3. To give incentives in the form of higher wages to the best workers.

• The conditions under which the staff worked also affect productivity.
• OB researchers discovered that the state of the minds of the people
influenced productivity.
 Organizational Behaviour(OB): A background
• There are two attitudes named as Theory x and Theory Y
Theory X
• The average human has an innate dislike of work
• There is a need therefore for coercion, direction and control
• People tend to avoid responsibility
Theory Y
• Work is as natural as rest or play
• External control and coercion are not the only ways of bringing about effort
directed towards an organization’s end
• Commitment to objectives is a function of the rewards associated with
their achievement
• The average human can learn to accept and further seek responsibility
• The capacity to exercise imagination and other creative qualities is widely
distributed.
Selecting the right person for the job
• Factors such as use of s/w tools and methodologies, affect the
programming productivity.
• In addition to this, from human resource point of view
• Experience has also got important influence on programming
productivity.
• Person who can communicate well with each other may be more
suitable
 Selecting the right person for the job
Recruitment Process
• Recruitment is often an organizational responsibility.
• Candidates may be
• Eligible - have a curriculum vitae which shows the right and required details
• Suitable - who can actually do the job well.
• Assessing actual skills rather than experience is more important
• General approach for recruitment policy
1.Create a job specification.
2.Create a job holder profile.
3.Obtain applicants.
4.Examine CV’s.
5.Interviews.
6.Other procedures.
Instruction in the best method
• Special effort has to be made for recruiting a new member for an
existing project
• When new members of the team are recruited, the Team Leader(TL)
will need to plan their induction into the team very carefully.
• The TL should be aware of the need to assess continually the training
needs of their team members.
• Some training might be given to the new recruit
• Externally: by some commercial training companies
• Internally: by their colleagues in the organization
 Motivation

Motivation is the driving force by which humans achieve their goals

Models of motivation
• Taylorist model
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
• Herzberg two factor theory
• Expected theory of motivation
 Motivation

•Taylorist model- financial incentives

• Piece rates :
• Where workers are paid fixed some for each item they produce
• Causes difficulty if a new system changes the work practice
• Day rates :
• payment for time worked
• Varies depends upon the nature of the projects

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 Motivation

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

• Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
• Motivations vary from individual to
individual.
• Money is a strong motivator
• People will be motivated by different
things at different times.
• People will always feel dissatisfied, but
the focus of the dissatisfaction changes
over time.
• Hierarchy of needs – as lower ones
fulfilled, higher ones emerge
 Motivation
Herzberg two factor theory
Herzberg suggested two sets of factors affected job satisfaction
1. Hygiene or maintenance factors – make you satisfied if
they are right e.g. pay, working conditions
2. Motivators – make you feel the job is worthwhile e.g. a
sense of achievement or challenge

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 Motivation

The expected theory of motivation

• There is a need to be aware of how the day-to-day ups and downs of
system development affects motivation
Vroom and Colleagues developed a model to identify three influences on
motivation
• Expectancy – the belief that working harder leads to better performance
• Instrumentality – the belief that better performance will be rewarded
• Perceived value- of the resulting reward
• Motivation will be high when all the three factors are high.
• A zero level for any one of the factors can remove motivation

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 The Oldham-Hackman Job Characteristics model
• Job satisfaction is based on five factors.
• First three factors make the job meaningful
• Skill variety :
• The number of different skills that the job holder has the opportunity to exercise
• Task identity
• The degree to which your work and its results are associated with you
• Task significance
• The degree to which the job has influence on others
• The other two factors are
• Autonomy
• The discretion you have about the way that you do the job
• Feedback
• The information you get back about results of your work

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 The Oldham-Hackman Job Characteristics
model
Methods of improving motivation
• To improve motivation, managers might do the following
• Set specific goals
• Goals need to be demanding and yet acceptable to staff.
• Provide feedback
• Regular feed back about the progress
• Consider job redesign
• Jobs can be altered to make them more interesting
• Two measures to enhance the job design
• Job enlargement : to carry out wider variety of activities
• Job enrichment: given authority to take decisions
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Stress
• It is sometimes necessary to put in extra effort to overcome some
temporary obstacles or to deal with an emergency
• Good planning and control will help to reduce unexpected problems
generating unnecessary crises
• Stress may be caused by
• Role ambiguity
• When staff do not have clear idea of the objectives
• Role conflict
• Demand of two different roles ( parenting and doing business)
Health and safety
• Health and safety issues that relate to the conduct of a project is
considered here
• Responsibility for safety must be clearly defined at all levels.
• Top management must be committed to the safety policy
• The delegation of responsibility for safety must be clear
• Those to whom responsibilities are delegated must understand the responsibilities
and agree to them
• Job description should include definitions of duties related to safety
• Deployment of a safety officer and the support of experts in particular technical
areas
• Consultation on safety
• An adequate budgeting for safety costs
Some ethical and professional concerns
• There is a legal requirement to act to reduce the threats to the
healthy and safety of employees
• Even without laws, some ethical responsibilities are shared by all
members of the community regardless of their position
• To alert the emergency service when there is an accident
• Assets of the stakeholders must also be safeguarded by the company
• Normal ethical rules do not apply in business
• Competitors.. If they do not win they might lose
Some ethical and professional concerns (ICT)
• ICT practioners have special responsibilities
• It is not possible to have expertise in all areas of ICT. Hence it is unethical to
pretend to be knowledgeable about some area where they are not
• If an ICT practioner has expertise that would prevent a colleague from doing
something harmful, it would be unethical to remain silent
• Decisions made them should not only be technically justifiable but also be
unbiased
• When high level decisions have flaw, it is the responsibility of the software
engineer to point out such deficiencies
Working in teams
• A team is created to carry out a joint assignment
• By team, we mean groups of people who are working together.
• As software systems are huge in nature, Software development task
requires intense human mental activity
• This human effort has to be shared between individual developers
within team or between groups
• Hence how the efforts of individual developers within a team can be
coordinated well is a major concern now
Influence on all stages of the Step Wise project planning
• Collaborative nature of project work will have an influence on
nearly all stages of the Step Wise project planning frame work
• 1. Identify the project scope and objectives
• Here the stakeholders in the project are identified and
communication channels are established
• 2.identify project infrastructure
• The organization structure within which the project team will exist is
identified
• 3.analyse project characteristics
• Decisions made about how the project is to be executed
• 4.estimate effort for each activity.
• Individual and group experience will have a key influence on
developer productivity
• 5.Identify activity risks.
• Risks will include those that relate to staff such as continued
availability
• 6. Allocate resources
• 7. Review/publicize plan.
• A communication plan could be produced at this point
 Becoming a team
Team formation goes through five basic stages of development:
• Forming
• The members of the group get to know each other and try to set up some
ground rules about behaviour
• Storming
• Conflicts arise as various members of the group try to exert leadership and
the group’s methods of operation are being established
• Norming
• Conflicts are largely settled and a feeling of group identify emerges
• Performing
• The emphasis is now on the tasks at hand
• Adjourning (Mourning?)
• The group disbands

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Teams need to be balanced with different types of
people
• The chair
• not necessarily brilliant leaders but they must be good at running meetings, being calm, strong but tolerant
• The plant
• some one is very good at generating ideas and potential solutions to problems
• The monitor-evaluator
• good at evaluating ideas and potential solutions and helping to select the best one
• The shaper
• who helps to direct the team’s attention to the important issues
• The team worker
• skilled at creating a good working environment
• The resource investigator
• adept at finding resources, in terms of both physical resources and information
• The completer-finisher
• concerned with completing task
• The company worker
• A good team player who is willing under take less attractive task if they are needed for team success

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Group performance
• Works yield better results if carried out as a team
• Categories of group tasks
• Additive tasks
• Each participant effort are added to get the final result
• Compensatory task
• Errors of individuals are compensated by the input from others
• Disjunctive tasks
• There is only one correct answer
• Conjunctive
• Team members who are ahead help to meet the objective by assisting those who are
behind
 ‘Social loafing’
• Tendency for some team participants to ‘coast’ and let others
do the work
• Also tendency not to assist other team members who have
problems
• Suggested counter-measures:
• Make individual contributions identifiable
• Consciously involve group
• Reward ‘team players’

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 Decision making
• Categories
• Structured
• Simple, routine decisions
• Unstructured
• More complex, requires a degree of creativity
• Mental obstacles to good decision making
• Faulty heuristics
• Based only on information, might be misleading
• Escalation of commitment
• Once decided very difficult to alter
• Information over load
• Too much of information which disturbs
 Group decision making
• Decision made by the team are more likely accepted than those that
are imposed
• Groups deal less effectively with poorly structured problems needs
creative solutions
• Brainstorming techniques can help groups in this situation

Obstacles to good group decision making

• It is time consuming
• It can stir up conflicts within the group
• Decisions can be unduly influenced by dominant personality
• Risky shift – people in groups are more likely to make risky decisions than
they would as individuals
Measures to reduce the disadvantage of the
group decision making
• One method (Delphi approach) is to train the members to follow the
set procedures
• The cooperation of a number of experts is enlisted
• The problem is presented to the experts
• The experts record their recommendations
• These recommendation are collated and reproduced
• The collected responses are recirculated
• The experts comments on the ideas of others and modify their
recommendations if so moved
• If the leader detects a consensus, then the process is stopped otherwise the
comments are recirculated to the experts
Team heedfulness
• Group members are aware of the activities of others that contribute
to overall group success and can identify ways of supporting that
contribution
• Appearance of a ‘collective mind’ comes from shared understanding,
familiarity and good communication
• Concepts for promoting s/w development environment
• Egoless programming,
• Chief programmer teams
• Extreme programming and
• Scrum
Egoless programming
• Rather than keeping the programs confidential they become common
property and programming becomes egoless
• Peer code reviews are based on this idea where programs by the
individual are checked by the colleagues
 Chief programmer teams
• When the group size is larger, development becomes slower due to increased
communication
• Hence there is a need for more formalized and centralized structured team ( chief
programmer team)
• Chief programmer
• defines the specification, and design , codes , tests and documents the software
• Co-pilot
• Assists Chief programmer; discusses problems and writes code
• Editor
• supports Chief programmer and co-pilot;
• writes up the documentation drafted by chief programmer
• Program clerk
• maintains the actual code
• Tester
• Does testing
Extreme Programming(XP)
• It is a new version of chief programmer and co-pilot relationship
• Most XP promotes ‘collective mind’
• Rather than creating separate documents , the key software products,
software code and test data are enhanced
• Less formal and improved communication and coordination
• Test cases and expected results are produced before the code and act
effectively as a form of specification.
 Scrum
• Scrum process starts with a system architecture and planning phase
• The required release date for the product and a set of the desired features of the
product is defined in this stage
• This phase followed by a number of sprints, typically lasts between one and
four weeks
• Sprints are carried out by groups of 7 to 10 developers
• The progress of a sprint is marked by short meetings each day
• At the end of the sprint, all sprint teams meet with other stakeholders to review the
products created
• New features could be added , and previous ones deleted or modified
• The sprint process described above is then repeated
• When all the sprints have been completed ,there is a final closure phase
where tasks like regression and integration testing , and training guides to
create a final package for delivery to market
Organization and Team Structures
• Department Structure
• How is department organized into teams?
• Team Structure
• How are project teams structured?
Department structure

• Three broad ways of department structure

• Functional
• Developers are divided into functional groups based on their specialization
• Functional team working on a project does not physically meet the members of other
functional team, hence good quality documentation has to be maintained
• Project
• Assigned team carries out all the project activities and
• Remains in the same team until the completion of the project
• Matrix
• An extension of functional format and provides the advantage of both functional and
project format
• A pool of functional specialist is assigned to different project as needed and is
represented in a matrix
 Functional vs Project formats
• Ease of staffing
• Functional
• Provides an efficient solution to the staffing problem
• Any number of required personal can be brought into projects as needed, and can returned to
the functional group when they complete
• Project
• Mandates the manager to accept a fixed number of developers at the start of the project
• These developers work for the entire duration, hence many members idle in the initial stage
and the entire team comes under pressure at later phases
• Production of good quality document
• Functional
• Production of good quality documents
• Project
• Production of poor quality document
• Job specialization
• Functional
• Developers become specialized in different areas
• Project
• No specialization is available
 Functional vs Project formats (cont….)
• Efficient handling of problems associated with manpower turnover
• Functional
• Handles the problem effectively
• Project
• Does not handles the problem effectively
• Career planning
• Functional
• Makes it easier for a developer that is technically oriented called the technical ladder
• Project
• Facilitate a more general form career progression, where the developers become
business analysts and mangers
 Team Structure

• Team Structure
• Denotes reporting, responsibility ,and communication structures in individual
project teams
• Three team structures
• Chief Programmer
• Democratic
• Mixed team organizations
Chief Programmer Team
• A senior member provides the technical leadership and is designated
as the chief programmer.
• The chief programmer
• Defines the specification
• Constructs the high level design
• Partitions the remaining tasks of detailed design viz, coding, testing,
documentation etc., into many smaller tasks
• Assigns them to the team members
• Verifies and integrates the work completed by different team members
 Chief Programmer team
• Advantages
• A chief programmer is more efficient than a democratic team for completing
simple and small projects
• Disadvantages
• Provides an authority to assign work to the team members and to monitor their
work
• Inhibits collective and original thinking by the team members
• Subject to single point failure since too much responsibility and authority
• Information overload
Democratic Team
• Does not enforce any formal team hierarchy
• Decisions is based on discussions ,where any member is free to
discuss with any other member
• A manager provides the administrative leadership
• Offers higher moral and job satisfaction to team members
• Suitable for research oriented projects
• Encourages egoless programming
• Comparing with chief programmer team
• Suffers from lower manpower turnover
• Less productive
Mixed control team structure
• Draws ideas from both the democratic and chief programmer team
structure
• Suitable for large team sizes
• Extremely popular and sued in many software development
companies
• Incorporates both hierarchical reporting and democratic setup
Coordination Dependencies
• A coordination theory provides a useful classification of coordination
dependencies that are likely exist in organizational undertaking.
• Shared resources
• Producer-customer (‘right time’) relationship
• Task-subtask dependencies
• Accessibility (‘right place’) dependencies
• Usability(‘right thing’) dependencies
• Fit requirements
Dispersed and Virtual Teams
• Challenges
• The requirements for work that is distributed to contractors have to be
carefully specified
• Procedures followed needs to be formally expressed
• Coordination of dispersed workers can be difficult
• Payment methods needs to be modified
• Lack of trust of co-workers
• Assessment of the quality of delivered products
• Different time zones can cause communication and coordination problems
Communication Genres
• Something more than just the technical means of communicating
• There are some ‘ground rules’ about when and how much
communication should be carried out
• Official meetings – these rules might be quite formal
• Management meetings- each with their own conservation
• Email communication genre- advanced email based application can be
developed
• A major influence on the nature of communication genre is the
constraints of time
• Mode of communication can be categorized as combinations of two
opposites: same time/different time and same place/different place
Communication Genres
Same Place Different place

Meetings Telephone
Same time Interviews etc., Instant messaging

Noticeboards E-mail
Different times Pigeon-holes Voicemail
Documents
Early stages of a project
• At the start of the project , team members will need to build up their
trust and confidence in their coworkers.
• Same time/same place communication is good.
Intermediate design stages of the project
• Detailed design on different components could well be carried out in parallel in
different locations

Implementation stages of the project

• Once design is clarified and everyone knows his/her role.
• Different time/different place communication takes place.
Leadership: Types of authority
Position power
• Coercive power – able to threaten punishment
• Connection power – have access to those who do
have power
• Legitimate power – based on a person’s title
conferring a special status
• Reward power – able to reward those who comply

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Leadership: Types of power
Personal power
• Expert power: holder can carry out specialist tasks that are in demand
• Information power: holder has access to needed information
• Referent power: based on personal attractiveness or charisma

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Leadership styles
• Task orientation – focus on the work in hand
• People orientation – focus on relationships
• Where there is uncertainty about the way job is to
be done or staff are inexperienced they welcome
task oriented supervision
• Uncertainty is reduced – people orientation more
important
• Risk that with reduction of uncertainty, managers
have time on their hands and become more task
oriented (interfering)

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 Coaching style matrix

Figure 21.5 Developing team members by matching your supervision to their needs
 PMI examination content

Figure 24.1 PMI qualification examination content