Detailed Synopsis

SYNOPSIS
Self-organising “for profit” institutions
Submitted to
Faculty of Science & Technology
Tumkur University
Tumkur, India
by
Rajasimha A. Makaram
February 2013

This inquiry studied global organisations and explains, some of the informal roles
team takes-on, while balancing acts of contradicting priorities. In addition, having to
constantly manage oneself, in order to be self-organised.
The study was conducted over 10 years at the various organisations the researcher
worked-for in his normal role-of-duty. The inquiry was both longitudinal (over 10
years) and latitudinal (the scope of coverage increased as the role of the researcher
increased over his career). The data analysis for the inquiry covered 60-80
individuals from 9 organisations, playing various roles such as developers,
managers, VPs / SVPs/ Directors/ Managing Directors, CIOs/COOs and President. In
addition the shear size of the organisations (5,000-100,000) made the observation
to cover a much larger population covering both the development and business
cycle of software. The organisations were a mix of services, captive and product
based. As these were global organisations the teams were based out-of global
development center(s) such as Bangalore, Boston, Charlotte, Chennai, London,
Merrimack, Mumbai, New-York, Singapore, Tokyo and more.
The main contributions of this thesis are, ethnography based study of Senior
management in software development. Secondly a set of 7 narratives that provides
real-events, detailing what really happens against what is perceived. Thirdly it
presents the generalisation based on the ethnography based study by
conceptualising a theory based on roles-values-practices. Finally a model is
proposed, based on a set of 5 cultural-patterns, which can influence in the adoption
of self-organising philosophy at enterprise-level

Self-organising “for profit” Institution February 2013
1.0 Introduction
In the recent past, there has been an increasing interest to understand more of self-
organising concept in agile and lean software development teams. Multiple factors
have contributed to this increased interest as, software has become ubiquitous
pervading all walks of life. The problems that are getting solved through software are
also increasing exponentially and finally we still have not found the “silver bullet" to
effectively build software. The much cited report of the Standish Group in their 2011
edition, put successfully completed project at an abysmal rate of 37%
Increased adoption of agile and lean development methodologies have also
increased the inquiry into the social aspect of software development, be it for
delivering quality software, developer motivation, sustainable returns and more.
Socio-economic realities of the 21st
century are questioning some basic assumptions
at the organisational level in terms of management and organisation theory. Falling
birth-rates, increase in disposable income, new engagement model to deal with
knowledge-workers are some of the management challenges of the 21st
century. All
these factors question - “Whether we can build a lasting organisation? And can we
sustain IT organisations of the magnitude of tens-of-thousand associates".
1.1 Motivation
As the knowledge society with its economy and labour force evolved, the
organization model adopted by manufacturing industry by Ford and F.W Taylor
turned to be in-effective. Still the old model of organisational structure persisted as
there was no other alternative. The growth in knowledge based industry grew
exponentially, this rapid expansion and lack of alternative organisational structure
made the existing command-n-control structure easy to adopt. In late 1990s
software development teams made a start to change, by adopting agile and lean
philosophy in a very limited scale. Agile and lean management philosophy for
software development has seen its success in less than a decade since its inception.
The success stories have been more biased towards specific agile software
development methodology and also restricted to small group (~10-15 individuals)
within an organisation. In addition there has been an increased awareness of the
social aspect of software development and its importance in developing quality
software.
Submitted by: Rajasimha A Makaram 1 of 24

So all these factors make it compelling for us to take the agile and lean philosophy
and adopt at enterprise level.
2.0 Scope of the Research
The researcher with his successful contribution in the `Singapore Project', decided
to further his inquiry
on, effective ways to
develop software as
a revenue
generating activity.
Though our inquiry
started in 2000 with
a simple question
how to develop
software better?,
which evolved over
time leading to this
final question stated
here addressed through this research.
How to transform the current software development organisations into
a self-organising institution ?
We use term “institution" to mean organisations and business entity. We consciously
use the term institutions, so that readers feel that business organisations of future
would not be their just for profit or short-term goals. Business companies and
organisation need to be built to last long. Business, like school and parents, train
people. They help individuals advance. That gives them an opportunity to rectify
their past wrongs Business organisations of the future, more specifically knowledge
based economic activity such as software development business (which is the focus
of this thesis) would stand for a higher cause in the society. The companies of the
future would become an integral part of the development of society i.e. a social
obligation to be fulfilled along with its financial obligation to its investors.
We use qualitative research approach using ethnography in this thesis analysing 10
years of industrial data, spanning multiple countries (Asia,Europe,America), people
Figure 1: Research Scope

and organisation. The report address the research question in four parts -
[Q1:] How can we build upon the current body of software engineering knowledge,
from agile and lean software development philosophy to develop a self-organising
institution?
[Q2:] What roles do we need at enterprise level to be a self-organising institution?
[Q3:] What are the set of values a self-organising institution need to inculcate?
[Q4:] What are the best-practices to be adopted to be a successful self-organising
institution?
The first part(Q1) where we seek to leverage the body of knowledge from various,
related disciplines acted as a “theoretical lens" or as orientation to our research. Q1
is addressed through the Literature Survey in the Chapter 1 of the thesis. Figure-1
provides an overview of the scope of this research spanning across software
engineering, management theory and organisational theory. The later parts
(Q2,Q3,Q4) is addressed in Chapter 4, 5 and 6 respectively, in the thesis.
2.1 Research Contribution
The primary contributions of this thesis are:
• It presents an ethnography of a rarely-studied group : Senior
management in software development over both latitudinal and longitudinal
perspective covering multiple global organisations spanning various
countries/regions over a period of 10 years.
• A set of 7 narratives that provides real-events, detailing “what really
happens against what is perceived” and challenges senior management are
facing in the deteriorating economic scenario post the 2007 financial
meltdown.
• The thesis presents the generalisation based on the ethnography based
study: Roles (Associate, Coordinator, Partner and Mentor), Values (Managing
Oneself) and Practices (balancing contradicting priorities) in a Self-
organising institution.

• A model consisting of a set of 5 cultural-patterns, which extends the
theory proposed by some of the thought leaders, such as Phil Crosby, Watts
Humphrey and Jerry Weinberg, by incorporating the agile philosophy. This
model facilitates in the adoption of agile and lean philosophy at an
organisational level.
3.0 Thesis Structure
The following section describes the structure of the thesis. Chapter 1 (in the
thesis ) describes the motivations behind this research, the research question, the
contributions of this research, the structure of this thesis and the writing convention
which we would use across this thesis. Writing convention is important in our thesis
due to multiple reasons, firstly ethics. A primary obligation for an ethnographic
researcher is to his/her research participants and organisations. So we use various
methods to protect the identity of the participants of our study, either by using
fictional names for each participant, as well as for company artefacts. In all digital
communications, the identities are disguised. So these are detailed in the convention
section. Secondly as part of the thesis we recount field data, with direct quotes from
the participant inter-mixed with our analysis. So to differentiate the data from
analysis we need to adopt various formats, which is detailed in the writing
convention sections.
3.1 Literature Survey : Chapter 2
This chapter is a compendium of the evolving knowledge on agile and lean software
development methodology, management theory and relevant socio-economic
challenges relevant for software organisations in the 21st
century. In the context of
our research the contents of this chapter acted as a “theoretical lens or perspective"
to orient our inquiry process.
We start this chapter describing the traditional software development methodologies
i.e. Waterfall and Spiral model, by providing the historical relevance, contributions
and disadvantages. Later we discuss the various agile development methodologies
such as eXtreme Programming (XP), Feature Driven Development(FDD), Scrum and
other methodologies such as Agile Unified Process(AUP), Agile Modeling(AM) and
DSDM. We also describe Kanban from the lean methodology genre. The purpose of
describing these agile and lean methodologies to provide a reference to the various

agile practices, principles and values, that can be adopted at the enterprise-level as
organisations become self-organising. Self organising teams has seen a good
amount of success in the field, and also there exists sufficient literature and
practitioner notes as a source of body of knowledge to understand the challenges
and issues in adopting various agile values-principles-practice, at the team-level. We
constantly through out the thesis, call out for a higher level of agile and lean
practices (we prefer to call this as agile way of life, a philosophy) viz. Methodology
cult of “blindly following” steps detailed in the agile methodology. We see this,
religious following of steps dictated by methodology oriented practitioners, no
different from the TQM methodologies of such as ISO-9000, SEI/CMM(R)
and more. We
want practitioners to be aware and use various agile practices depending upon
individual needs of the project.
In the second part of the Literature Survey, we move into the organisational theory,
economics and management challenges of the 21st
century. Agile and lean
development methodology have been successfully implemented at team-level.
Teams form the basic unit of an organisation. In this section we provide an overview
of the organisation theory, reasoning for multi-perspective view of an organisation
to better understand the principles and dynamics. We end this section by presenting
the management challenges that are unique to the 21st
century. To get a broad
perspective of organisational theory we studied the work Hatch J.M. Later moving
onto self-organisation as detailed by Morgan, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. Including
Complex Adaptive System(CAS) theory from various perspective of - Theoretical
ecologist Simon Levin, Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman and Eric Bonabeau &
Christopher Meyer.
Falling birth-rate is one of the biggest challenges the organisations would have to
face. Including some of the unexpected names make to the list of countries where
falling birth-rate will be an issue as we move towards 2050. Some of the unusual
names that make the list are, China, Iran, Bangladesh and more. Europe and Japan
have some immediate challenges as the percentage of aged increases, thus
impacting the socio-economic balance. Africa, Middle-East and India are poised in
the next 20-30 years to reap the benefits of demographics, if their policy makers
make the right decision. To mention some better education policy, better health-care
to all, not overburdening the social security-net and more. The second reality which
is going to power the growth of global economy is the dawn of consumerism in
the hither-lands of China and India where middle-class population is getting added in

millions every few months. Some of the luxury-brands from Europe may have an
issue of plenty, thus losing exclusivity in countries like China. Matured industries are
becoming emerging industries in these emerging economies such as automobile.
Thirdly organisations of the future need to last long for a marathon, rather
than run a sprint. Since the investors of today are people who are investing for long
term (20-30years in future). For organisations, the stakeholders are not just the
financial investors, employees and government are all key stakeholders. People in
future are going to live long, work for longer duration. Having said that labour force
in the future would consist majority of part-timers, as people tend to take breaks
often during their work-life, but work longer. So organisations in future need to
embrace diversity from gender, age and demographics to sustain the marathon.
Fourthly globalisation would bring about “global standards” that need to be
adhered by both local and global organisations be in a local school or a restaurant at
the road-corner. It is no more sustainable for global organisations to just look at
profitability. New performance measure are being detailed out including, how
responsible is the organisation from overall sustainability be it environment,
employee engagement and more. Next, Information technology has become the
technology enabler for many transformatory changes that are happening all around
us. As we detailed at in the beginning IT has become a tool, it is no more the
“proprietary" of Computer Science graduates. Gartner, a research company
estimates that 25% application to be developed by 2014 would be done through
non-IT professional. There is a big movement which sees software as the building
block of the digital world and they equate free, unrestricted access as a primary
right of every citizen. It is a group of social activists, which slightly differs from the
commonly known group of Free and Open Source Software(FOSS). This group come
from the perspective of creating social equality and justice in the knowledge based
society to software in the lines of public health, public education or public
transportation. Computers that had a very humble, noble beginning of maintaining
the accounts in a institutions has become inseparable from the business it serves.
Such is the tight integration and impact to institutions from ICT technologies. Finally
we say change is constant. One of the facets of change is to innovate. Institutions
including countries have innovated to succeed in this fast changing world. The new
mantra taught by AppleTM
and a country like Korea and its companies like
SamsungTM
, HyuandiTM
is to Imitate with an eye to innovate (called immovation)

3.2 Research Design : Chapter 3
This chapter provides our ontological and epistemological orientation to conduct
research. Ethnography is the method adopted to conduct the research. In this
chapter we detail the role of the researcher, the theory and application of
ethnography in this research. We describe detailed steps in conducting the research
including the data validation and ethical considerations. Finally the format of the
write-up we have adopted to present our results.
In Ethnography the researcher observes
an intact cultural group in their natural
setting. Ethnography has its roots in
anthropology, and it gives rich field-data
based on the participants live interactions
with the group under inquiry. Ethnography
is not new to software engineering.
Ethnography has become a mainstream
qualitative research method to study the
social-aspect of software development
since 1990s and is gaining grounds as one
of the preferred method to conduct
qualitative inquiry. Ethnography has been
used extensively to explore the social
aspects of Agile teams
The process of conducting ethnographic
study is very simple, as it is similar to our
everyday observation in our real-world. A
typical lifecycle of a ethnographic based
inquiry is illustrated in Figure-2.
Ethnography also provides flexibility in
terms of various means, including the way
researcher can get immersed in the
environment s(he) wants to study. The level of immersion is not a fixed point on a
scale, but a continuum. At one end of the scale is, researcher remains as an
observer so that s(he) does not influence the action of the observing group
(practically not possible when participants are told they would be observed). While
Figure 2: Life-cycle of a Ethnographic
inquiry

at the other end the participant completely immerses himself and becomes part of
the whole interactions. We in the scope of this inquiry were completely immersed,
playing the role of a “backyard researcher" to observe the organisation the
participant-observer worked.
In our inquiry the main source of data were - field-notes from participant-
observation, document analysis, semi-structured discussion and informal
conversations. These data artefacts were all made available as part of the role the
participant-observer played at the various organisations
The crux of this research has been the embodied work of a software project
manager. A manager due to his organisational structure has a 360o
view of the
software organisation around him or her, thus providing a vivid experience of the
software development activity from all major perspective. Be it development team,
senior management, customer and other stakeholders that make-up a typical
software development and business cycle.
This position has moved-up over a span of 10 years, with the career progression of
the participant-observer. Thus providing both a longitudinal and latitudinal view of
managing a software business. Ethnography, based on its interpretivist research
philosophy is an appropriate research methodology by which to understand the daily
work practices of software professionals.
The participant-observer has spent significant time playing the role of management
in a software development organisation, in their normal work environs, observing
and recording the behaviour in real time as they worked together to perform their
daily work i.e. winning contracts, developing large and complex software solution,
delivering them and finally maintaining these software. Thus getting an end2end
perspective of both a software development and its associated business cycle.
Data Analysis
We would say data analysis is the “heart" of qualitative inquiry, since a typical field-
work for ethnography will produce large amount of data. Once the data has been
collected and recorded, the next step is to analyse and interpret the data. In the
course of our inquiry we followed the generic coding process used across all
qualitative research genre including ethnography.

Coding is the process of examining the raw qualitative data which will be in the
form of words, phrases, sentences or paragraphs, and assigning CODES or labels.
Just as a title represents and captures a book or film or poem’s primary content and
essence, so does a code represent and capture a datum’s primary content and
essence
Below is an illustration from one of the roles (Associate) which we have
conceptualised in a self-organising institution -
[P13, developer] contribution is highly commendable. [P13] joined the team late was
able to learn fast & contribute towards the successful delivery of the [...] module in
[...]. [P13 putting in] late hours to complete the module assigned to [..] is
appreciated ... [P13] joined late after the design phase, [P13] has been very
proactive in suggesting some of the design approaches based on ... past experience
- P2, Manager
Category: Associate
Code : Able to learn fast & contribute
Sub-code:: develop code (programming)
Sub-code:: does LLD
Sub-code:: hard working
Sub-code:: delivers quality
Sub-code:: proactive
Sub-code:: learns fast
Some categories may contain clusters of coded data that merit further refinement
into subcategories. And when the major categories are compared with each other
and consolidated in various ways, you begin to progress toward the thematic,
Figure 3: A streamlined codes-to-theory model for qualitative inquiry

conceptual, and theoretical level of abstraction. As a very basic process, codifying
usually follows an ideal and streamlined scheme illustrated in Figure-3.
In our inquiry multiple major categories emerged like Coordinator, Partner, and
Mentor. When we refined them to derive the next level of abstraction (concepts) it
was logical to group them as Roles in a self-organising institution. We have
discussed more about the roles in the Chapter 4 in the thesis.
Similarly we were able to derive two more concepts i.e. Values and Practices,
which are detailed further in Chapter 5 and 6 in the thesis. Figure-4 illustrates the
roles, values and practices that emerged from our data analysis.
Data Validation
To ensure validity of report we have used multiple methods, which are described in
this section. A qualitative data is measured by reliability, validity and generalisability
A common question raised about qualitative research is - it lacks the rigour of a
statistical approach based on experiments in a controlled or quasi-controlled set-ups.
To answer this, there is a fundamental difference between quantitative and
qualitative inquiry. Quantitative inquiry which is typically attributed to scientific
experiments where various “influencing factors” are controlled. In the case of human
behaviour it is very complex to control various factors, hence it is not suitable for
statistical technique. In addition qualitative inquiry “does not want to control” the
complexity in human behaviour and thus ensuring all factors is available for
observation. The second question is on the format of the thesis write-up: qualitative
write-ups do not follow the typical computer science technical paper format, instead
relies on thick descriptions which are a product of ethnographical studies.
We maintained memos on code and its definition thus code drift is minimised
during coding process. Literature on “quality in qualitative research” suggests , to
check the report with natives from the same culture to relate the write-up to
their own. To do this, individuals from the software industry with a minimum of 6-8
years were asked to review and we collected feedback via unstructured discussion
on the level of reflection these individuals could have to their own environment and
organisation. The sample reviewers were from global organisations and most of
them have worked, lived in India and USA. The second perspective is to provide a
vivid, rich, thick narrative as viewed from a native’s perspective, providing the

reader the setting and perspective to validate our observations
Some of the other validating strategies we adopted as part of our inquiry approach
were
• Triangulation by collecting information from multiple projects, organisations
and people spanning across multiple countries.
• Specific descriptions have been discussed as part of data collection and
analysis, in an unstructured format with the individuals involved. Thus
ensuring their consistency in field-data to a large extent
• As this research is based on 10 years thus helping the participant-observer to
observe the participants, setting and behaviour over prolonged time.
From a generalisation perspective, we have come out with a theory on the roles,
values and practices for a self-organising institution which has been detailed in
Figure 4: Roles, Values and Practices in a Self-organising institution

Chapter 4, 5 & 6 in the thesis.
3.3 Roles in a Self-organising institution: Chapter 4
This chapter presents one of the core contributions from this research, the
identification of the four roles in a self-organising institution. These roles along with
the practice and values are self-supporting in ensuring the organisation to be
effective. In this chapter we will discuss the four roles with various illustrations from
our field data and in the following next two chapter(in the thesis) we present the
best-practices and the values that nurtures the formation of these self-organising
team at the institution level. These roles currently being played is going to evolve in
future(Table-1) based on the socio-economic realities that would reshape the
business world as we anticipate. We will be discussing about some of the factors that
would change the shape of business organisations as they stand today in Chapter 8.
Role Description Current Future
Associate Is the basic unit of a self-organising team.
It comprises of everyone involved in the
typical software development lifecycle :
requirements gathering, design, coding,
testing. Includes build, release
deployment (all activities to get the
solution developed, deployed and
supported)
Developers,
testers,
support
engineers,
deployment
engineers,
build
engineers
developers,
testers,
support
engineers
Coordinator A person among the associates who
decides to represent the team with all
stakeholder external to the team. In
addition the coordinator acts as the
mentor, manager, facilitator for the team,
when they request him/her to do so
Manager,
Leads
Coordinator
Partner Run the software development business.
Currently three prime responsibility gets
shared with various individuals – delivery,
business development and solution
architecture. We expect this roles will all
get merged into one individual in future.
To a large extent the first two roles have
been merged, solution architecting is the
one that will have to happen
BU Heads,
Business
Development
Managers, Sr.
VP, Managing
Director
Business
Owner
Mentor These are individuals that provide
financial funding. We expect in future the
funding will be typically done by few
individuals (e.g. HNIs)
Board of
Directors,
investor,
mentor
Mentor-cum-
investor
Table 1: Evolution of Roles in future

Associate
This is a role which is played by majority of the participants in an institution. As we
described earlier institution is broad term which we use across this thesis to define
all types of business organisation and companies.
An associate is everybody in an institution. It can be a developer, tester, support
engineer or a team lead. Associates constitutes the role with largest population in
the organisation. Number of years of experience, technology expertise or skill-level,
will not be the criteria for deciding on the people playing an associate role. To
illustrate further an individual with 20+years of experience can be an associate
based on his/her career expectation and also a fresher who joins from college with
no experience. Key characteristics that emerged from our data collection activity are
illustrated in Figure-5. The person need to be technically strong, need to be a
person who can grasp and comprehend information and execute this new learning
(i.e. a fast learner), the person needs to demonstrate flexibility, a good team player,
comes with the right attitude and should be cross-functional.
Coordinator
A coordinator is a role that
can be played by any of the
associates which involves
facilitation, coordination
activities. So coordinator is
not a designation, but a role
played by an associate. We
expect one of the associate
would volunteer to play the role of a coordinator. The team would collectively decide
if there is a need for such a role and one of the member would volunteer for this
role. Typically we have found the percentage of coordination is more, hence one gets
nominated to execute this full-time. If it could be done by multiple associates by
time-sharing, there would not be a need for an explicit role coordinator. Having said
we have seen both end of the spectrum. At one end, where an associate plays full-
time coordinator while at the other-end, an associate
Figure 5: Emergence of Associate concept

Partner
A partner is a person who runs a specific business. S(he) is responsible for the
sustainable development of the unit. When we use the word sustainable we mean it
is about balancing between customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and
profitability of the unit, all the three parameters are important. Some of the
attributes that emerged as part of Partner were – Strong business knowledge both
from technology and business, Strong leadership, Operational expertise and Personal
traits to be a good leader.
A Partner is a person who understand both technology and business well. She is a
person who can articulate the technology road-map for the business they are in. To
illustrate further a partner's native skill may be business or technology, she may
have started her career at the trading desk for fixed-income or may started at the
other end as a technologist developing pre-payment model(software solution) for
MBS (Mortgage Backed Securities). But over the years this person would have
understood the ”big picture'' of Fixed-income or Securitised Products i.e both from
the technology and domain perspective.
A Partner is a role that requires a person to be a good communicator, articulate
his/her thoughts to all stakeholders, be a person envisioning a technology roadmap
for a specific business or selling a solution to a external customer or exhorting his
team to achieving
Strategic thinking which involves having a “big picture" of both business and
technology landscape. Able to visualise how the business and technology landscape
will evolve is also key attribute from a strategic thinker. A person who can see an
opportunity to “immovate" rather than take large transformational innovations.
Sourcing funds is yet another critical responsibility of a partner, be it for new
initiative or to sustain the business entity. Developing strategic partnership with
various competitors and peers in a specific business landscape, is equally important
to be operationally efficient, for a partner. Vendor management plays a key role to
be a successful partner. Always the partner needs to balance between build .vs.
partner .vs. acquire options
There are times where in the coordinator needs to take a hard-call where in there is
a breach of ethics or code-of conduct. During these times the organisation looks up
for the partner/ coordinator take a deceive action, moving beyond the short-term

goal of project and people. In addition the duo of partner and coordinator at time
need to take a call on non-performance by certain team-members. Non-performance
is something collectively decided by the team and a recommendation is made to the
partner
Mentor
The role of mentor what we have proposed in this thesis is a new concept. Mentors
for start-up is a evolving concept, but our definition of mentor is variant of what is
evolving. Since mentor for a business is new, hence we could not find substantial
data to back this up but our tacit knowledge “told" us this is key a role that needs to
be there for a self-organising institution to succeed.
The mentor has two roles to perform in our structure, financial funding as well as
provide the business wisdom to the partner to run his/her business. In a typical
organisation this is divided between the investor (for funding) and the board
(counsel for corporate governance). For this discussion we will restrict it to one
individual who invest both finance and “sweat-equity” to ensure the entity succeeds.
We also assume the mentor/mentee relationship is one-to-one, while the relationship
of investor/investee would be many-to-one. It can be also be a case that the partner
may seek a mentor outside the “investor-group"
In our theory we propose the optimum model of mentor-partner relationship is when
mentor is invested both financially and as well as through mentoring. The reason is
mentor will be more aware of the ground realities of the issues the partner is facing
than an external mentor. But this should no way comprise the independence,
autonomy the partner expects in handing his business. The mentor needs to be
aware that he needs to keep these two roles of investor and mentor as distinct as
possible.
To characterise a typical mentor, S(he) could be a High Net-worth Individual (HNI)
and hence has invested in the business run by the partner. In addition the mentor
may also have a day-job in terms of a CEO of an organisation and s(he) is doing
mentoring more as a personal passion, to contribute to the society via incubating an
entrepreneurship. Two points come out, availability of time and the return of
investment. From the time perspective we have discussed in the earlier section.

3.4 Values in a Self-organising institution: Chapter 5
We follow the roles with the values which a self-organising institution holds. The
single most important value that emerged was Managing oneself. In this chapter
we provide various
attributes such as
fear, lack of courage,
lack of trust,
management's
concern of having
fun@work. All these
emotions reflect as in-
congruent action. The
solution to this
incongruence is to
manage oneself.
Figure-6 shows the
emergence of the
concept of “lack of
courage” which when
view from a positive
perspective become
an attribute for self-management i.e. Courage
For us to understand the merit of managing oneself in the context of software
development also knowledge industry as whole. Software unit is considered the
basic unit, we need to look at software and its development from a new perspective.
We know the classical quality triangle - to bring in quality software there are three
levers i.e. process, people and technology. In the following few sentences we
correlate these three lever. We start with the history of Quality - In one of the video
on the internet, Mary Poppendieck quotes the “Principles of Scientific Management”
which was published in 1910s, which became the gospel for management(quality)
across all industries including the new-age like software. Some of the flawed
assumptions as shared by Mary from the most cited work of F.W Taylor is, people will
do little as possible, workers don't care about quality, workers are not smart, they
need continuous monitoring, workers need to be told what to do, workers are lazy.
Figure 6: Emergence of lack of courage

The managers or engineers tell them how and what to do; If the workers do a
good(quality) job they are paid more. This school of thought put people at their
lowest competency. Mary says in the course of her video, that this mind-set have
been in specific pockets. Mary says when she worked at 3MTM
she was oblivious of
such a process and water-fall model. We would say on the contrary “Taylorism” is the
essence of those software process methodologies of 1990s such as SEI/CMM, ISO,
TQM, and more, may be to a lesser extent today. Process did not want to consider
the social-aspect of people which make-up factories. Process brought in a
“mechanisation of human beings". Process which were written by these smart
engineers to ensure the overall productivity bar gets raised, since these process
detailed the ideal way to work to maximise productivity and profit.
So when we perfect a process it is automated, thus becoming technology.
Technology also passes through a timeline, we humans tend to associate present to
technology. But some of the technologies are, stone when it was used by early man
to hunt, metals weapons and utensils in the metal-age, farming to grow food (i.e
when human civilisation evolved from hunting to gathering), including the steam-
powered looms of 1920-30s. One of the study in early 1970s estimated that
technology in the current knowledge based society adds approximately 25-30% to
efficiency. In 2013, it is much faster - just imagine the mobile phones 5 years back to
present day, you get what we mean!
To conclude the topic on quality, historically we started with the perspective people
needs to be told, managed. Then process was introduced to generalise by writing
down the steps by “experts''. Process because the cook-book for individuals to be
experts by mechanically following the steps articulated in the process handbook. As
a natural progression, process was perfected thus leading to automation of process,
which lead to technology. In the last 20-30 years technology has been in the mode of
“continuous improvement" where we are able to see a 20-30%+ CAGR, thus losing
technology are control lever to improve quality. Technology here refers to the tools.
People-factor has been the least utilised until-now, hence the current thought is to
correct the flaw in terms of people and look at the various social-levers to improve
productivity/quality. Software development is a means rather than the product (i.e
Software is a medium to capture knowledge not a product, as we discussed earlier).
The software tools (infrastructure) is become indistinguishable from the solution
But as the age of industrialisation progressed giving way to software, in the last 20-

30 years (to be exact since 1990s) has radically changed the landscape of industry.
As we detailed in the previous section there is no industrial sector where software
has not pervaded and made an impact.
Managing oneself is a skill that needs to be practised and perfected over years. We
believe in constant learning, so everyone needs mentoring and coaching, the focus
and intensity may vary. An associate may require a more “hands-on" mentoring
while a partner may require a “light-touch" mentoring. As we mentioned earlier, we
believe in worldly wisdom that comes through experience and facilitates perfection
of self-management. We would like to quote - “Some of the personal effectiveness
comes from training and experience from past projects, and some of it comes from
the ability to take in what's happening in current projects. Even more of it comes
from past experience of more general kind: experience as a human being
functioning in the world"
An individual who has reached higher level of practice on managing himself/herself
will also behave in a congruent way. So congruent action is the most visible attribute
of managing oneself. In this chapter we will interchangeable use managing oneself,
self-management and congruent behaviour
3.5 Practices in a Self-organising institution: Chapter 6
In this chapter we present the final concept that emerged from our inquiry. A self-
organising institution needs to do the act of balancing across various contradicting
factors such as creativity .vs. predictability, generalisation .vs. specialisation, short-
term .vs. long-term and more. In the chapter, we mention some of those practices
that needs to be balanced with its counter-weight. The current mix of IT organisation
come in various size and shape, the size can vary from few 10s to 50,000+. So
balancing becomes a big part of all organisations more so with large organisations.
Since these large IT organisation typically spans across 3-4 countries cutting across
multiple (~5-6 time-zones).
Creativity .vs. Predictability
Software development is a intellectual activity and people who like a lot of creativity
and freedom are the ones that will join as developers. Some say we currently have 4
generations of workers in our labour-foce. So to keeping these “Millennials”
motivated we need to know how to balance the creative urge of these neo-artists

with the predictability a business needs. In addition we have the rest of the three
sets of generation whose idea, views of creativity and freedom needs to be
balanced. Some of the contradicting practices discussed under this section are
detailed process documentation vs. good enough, sketchy process documentation,
following in letter-n-spirt methodologies vs. choosing best-practices, contracting for
a whole project .vs. specific portion of the project and more
Paternalistic .vs. Laissez-Faire Leadership
Leadership exhibited by individuals are based on the perceived success experienced.
A leader or organisation needs to balance between control and delegation.
Management wants control, whereas employees wants Laissez-faire i.e. free reign
without no control at all. We observe there is none to few software organisation at
the extreme end i.e. autocratic style . Paternalistic behaviour is quite common in the
software industry i.e. “We the organisation know what is best for you, the employee;
we will take care, you don't worry" is the creed of the organisation and its leaders.
Some of the contradicting practices discussed in this section are – do we need
manager in a self-organising teams or not? Should the manager or the team decide
the performance incentives of the team? Should team be involved in the selection of
their manager or not? And more
Socialist .vs. Market driven Employment
Should organisation be socialistic in its perspective, should it have financial
assistance program for its employee to buy a home or car? Should it provide its
employees access to well-being and health-care professionals?, Or should it treat
employees as adults who can take care of themselves and don't need any
paternalistic treatment from its employer?
We have observed organisations are both paternalistic in terms of, want to know how
much was spent on your business trip, as well as it would like to take care of your
well-being and health by providing free-membership access to various health-clubs.
Most of the organisations we observed ensured employees were treated well. Some
of the contradicting practices that are discussed in this section are – Should there is
a healthy competition between vendors and local captives at offshore? Executive
salary needs to be transparent or not? To what extent can disagreement be existing
in an team before the team becomes unproductive. An example towards this case

was a welder had issues with his pay and taken the issue to the court-of-law, and still
both the employee and employer carried on with their work, in spite such strong
disagreements? Can organisations of future tolerate this level of disagreement
Generalist .vs. Specialist
This is a very pertinent question both for individuals as well as the organisation. Do
we hire and/or groom generalist or specialist? Software industry is a super-
specialised discipline, like all other fields be it medicine, legal, finance or
communication.
A generalist is a person who has developed knowledge “horizontally", that is, a
person is experienced in most of the subject-areas, but not too deep in all subject-
areas. While a specialist is a person, who has developed knowledge “vertically" in a
specific subject-area , that is, a person is not necessarily familiar with all subject-
areas, but instead one is highly experienced in a few of them. Specialists are rated
as more valuable for society if measured by the wage level.
Similarly we have discussed various other contradicting practices such as Short-term
vs. Long-term, Unity vs. Diversity, Change vs. Status-qua
3.6 Self-organising institution – a model: Chapter 7
In this chapter we propose a model for a self-organising team to move into a self-
organising institution based on the roles, values and practices that emerged through
our inquiry. We provide a brief history of using to various thought leaders on cultural
patterns as adopted in software engineering in the last 20+ years. We finally end
this chapter by discussing in detail the relevance of this model in the context of
some beliefs and hypothesis we hold, on the way software development and its
related business process will evolve in the coming years.
The model proposed in this chapter is set of 5 cultural patterns, each pattern is a
means to solve a specific problem. So each pattern is independent to that extent of
able to solve problem at at a specific "level" and also they provide the foundation to
move up to take much larger problem to solve. In the context of our discussion
problem is defined by three inter related attributes, i.e. complexity, competitive
landscape and the customer need. Culture is invisible, but ingrained in the minds
and action of each individual

The model consists of a set of 5 cultural-patterns, which extends the theory
proposed by some of the thought leaders, as Phil Crosby, Watts Humphrey and Jerry
Weinberg to incorporate the agile philosophy.
Pattern-1: This pattern would consists of a small team of 10-12 people, leveraging
off-the shelf agile development methodologies be it scrum, FDD, XP, etc. This is the
baseline pattern, thus we can find many teams operating currently in this pattern.
Team operating at P1 would typically be involved in development activities since
there is sufficient source of knowledge detailing how to adopt agile methodologies
across the development activities
Pattern-2: In this pattern many individual teams come together to form a union to
address a specific business problem. For example the development team that was
working on developing market place connectivity may join with a support team that
provides support for a market data feed. The power is in union, thus the teams are
able to expand their scope of business coverage. Pattern-2 is where support
activities gets integrated with the development core. The union is a combination of
development(core) with testing or application support activities. In the course of this
discussion application support refers to both application and its under lying
infrastructure.
Pattern-3: This is a pattern where the multiple team(s) come together to provide
technology solutions to a specific business area. This is the point in time the team
has a “shape” of a mini-organization and can be autonomous and ability to generate
funding for self-sustaining (if it chooses to be). This is the pattern the organization
has both technology & related business domain knowledge to solve real-life
problems. This pattern comprises all functional units in a typical, current day
organization moving into the new paradigm of self-organising, lean & agile operating
model. From a role perspective this is the pattern where the partner would get
introduced. The typical team size we expect at this point in continuum is
approximately 150-400 associates, spanning across multiple geographic sites. We
would call such a team as a Business Unit since the team has capacity and
capability to deliver solutions for one specific business line e.g. Securitised products
at the minimum or at a larger scale electronic trading infrastructure supporting
multi-asset class.

Pattern-4: To state some of the characteristics of this pattern – an individual sets
his salary, the subordinates select their boss, there could be different means of
employment model/options available - as dramatic as working for a company and its
competitor without the fear of conflict-of-interest
Pattern-5: This is the pattern where the team is in a continuous improvement
mode, where new ideas would be experimented and successfully institutionalised
3.7 Conclusion: Chapter 8
This chapter summarises the research contributions from this thesis, discusses the
limitations and the scope of future work. Some of the limitations, refer to commonly
discussed questions with adopting ethnography for study of software. In addition a
need for adopting a different means viz. what is adopted in the scope of this inquiry
(i.e. backyard researcher) is put forth as an activity to bring in pluralism into
organisational behaviour. Though we still are apprehensive of alternative means,
other than backyard researcher since a typical “for profit" organisation will not share
information to an external person/researcher to level required for reanalysis of the
data presented in course of this thesis.
3.8 Set of 7 narratives : Appendix
One of the characteristics of ethnography studies are “thick descriptions" which
provide a vivid description of the participant observation in their natural
environment. As part of the thick description we provide set of 7 narratives based
on real-events in the course of the research. Narratives have gained importance in
the recent past as a medium to denote pluralism in the organisational research. To
name some of the seminal works on technical-work related narratives are those of,
Julian Orr's study of the repair technicians at XeroxTM
and Gerardo Patriotta's work at
FaitTM
Auto, Italy where team engages in resolution of disruption to production floor
in a traditional pressing plant.
In addition we have attached the internal technical note titled “Ten-steps to
successful Object-Oriented Project Management" - which is the first to record
the history of the Singapore Project, the project which has been credited to be the
incubator for many agile and lean projects software methodologies. The note
contains some salient characteristics which did not make-it to the much cited book
on FDD, titled “Java modeling in color”

Before we provide a brief overview of the 7 set of narratives, we would like to
emphasise, that the data set is common across both the generalisation as well as
the narratives. Hence these narratives supplement the generalisation provided
through the Chapter 4: Roles, Chapter 5: Values and Chapter 6: Practices.
An Autobiography of a software solution - This describes one of the technically
challenging project taken up by an Indian software vendor(2006), for execution in a
onsite-offshore model. The most part of the technology was either proprietary or
new to the team. The team had to be quickly ramped up from 5 to 50 in a matter of
days. In the midst of these senior management and customer became nerves thus
disrupting the project rhythm. People issues were plenty. It had all signs of failure.
Did the project get delivered? What was the overall experience of the team working
on a such a high-pressure project?...
A tale of two sisters - This narrative provides comparison of two organisations where
one had to go through a lot of change (2007-10) including a development site had to
closed, the management in US decided to sell-off the unit here in India, and various
other strategic initiatives that were adopted. How these impacted the life of Senior
mangers here in India and US? In addition it provides the various underlying cultural
difference across both the organisation. These two are large global organisations, so
perspective of people across various national culture is also evident...
The Death-March Project - This narrative describes a near-impossible project where a
team of nearly 100 members and its management team worked tirelessly for 60-90
hours/week for nearly 5-6 months in early 2000. It all started because of a ego clash
between two senior managers. The team was going through a hell - a Sr. manager
cried in a meeting since the rest did not hear him out, going home at midnight was
considered a luxury by the team. Recruitment interviews were conducted at
11:00PM, team members went home once in 2-3 day. All around people were
hysteric, many left the project/organisation while some stayed on!....
A Project in Hell - A hell on earth was the experience of the team of three member
who took up a project for a large financial institution in 2002-03, based out of NYC,
USA. All code of professionalism was down-the-drain. A contractor (who was playing
the role of customer manager!) constantly abuses the developers with gender and
racial sensitive comments. One day the customer management took cognisance of
the un-professionalism and terminated the contractor. The team gets pulled in a turf

war between two warring fractions?. How did the team survive? How does the
vendor organisation feel about their development team? Do they empathise and
support the team?...
A Sprint Assignment - The tale of a 5 member team on a 9-week consulting
assignment in 2004 - a lot of things to be achieved in a short-time, highly technical,
quality of work is great. Team comes with varying personality and experience (a
senior professional is like 30+ years experience, at the other extreme is a lead with
5 years). In the midst is a new business development manager with his first project
and his sole motivation to maximise his commission. It is a distributed team, client is
from Middle-East and is very fastidious. How does the team dynamics work out? Will
the team deliver?....
Project No-where - An internal IT initiative at one of the global system integrator
during 2004-06. In addition to typical challenges of software, the team has to
navigate the “power brokers" across the organisation to roll-out the system. New
business concepts are introduced all stakeholders need to agree and comply. Will the
team be able to rollout? Development team is getting jittery since the roll-out is not
progressing as planned? Will the team able to get executive sponsor to push the
rollout? In addition the organisation acquires two small units, will these integration
occur seamlessly?. One of the exiting system need to be decommissioned, which is
the life-line for another team. How will they react?....
Goddam Project - A (jinxed?)project where no manager sticks for more than couple of
months. This project is part of a larger program for one of the major in financial
information space. The senior members(in the vendor organisation) shows no sign to
invest time and energy to build a healthy relationship with the client. The client
absolutely has no trust with the vendor, still he stays!?. The client is on thin-wire to
escalate even for minor issues, but none to hear on the “other-side". Typical issues
with people, release review happens late in the night over “instant-messenger",
customer has no trust with the vendor, issues are many but, no easy way-out. Both
the vendor and the customer are “tied at the hip”. So what happens....

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