Unit V STAFFING IN SOFTWARE PROJECTS Managing people – Organizational behavior – Best methods of staff selection – Motivation – The Oldham-Hackman job characteristic model – Ethical and Programmed concerns – Working in teams – Decision making – Team structures – Virtual teams – Communications genres – Communication plans.

1. MG6088 SOFTWARE PROJECT MANAGEMENT
UNIT – V
Dr.A.Kathirvel, Professor and Head, Dept of CSE
M.N.M Jain Engineering College, Chennai
1

2. UNIT V
STAFFING IN SOFTWARE PROJECTS
Managing people – Organizational behavior – Best
methods of staff selection – Motivation – The
Oldham-Hackman job characteristic model –
Ethical and Programmed concerns – Working in
teams – Decision making – Team structures –
Virtual teams – Communications genres –
Communication plans.
TEXT BOOK
Bob Hughes, Mike Cotterell and Rajib Mall: Software Project
Management – Fifth Edition, Tata McGraw Hill, New Delhi, 2012.
2

3. Managing people
 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
3

4. ‘Step Wise’ - an overview
0.Select
project1. Identify
project objectives
2. Identify project
infrastructure
3. Analyse
project
characteristics
4. Identify products
and activities
5. Estimate effort
for activity
8. Review/ publicize
plan
6. Identify activity
risks
7. Allocate
resources
9. Execute plan
10. Lower level
planning
Review
Lower
level
detail
For each
activity
Some objectives can
address health and
safety during projects
All concerns have
impact at all stages,
but particularly in
step 1, 2, 6 & 7

5. Understanding Behavior
 ‘Handling of people’ is an important aspect of
project management
 2 approaches:
Positivist approach
Inter-pretivist approach
5

6.  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.
Understanding Behavior
6

7. 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.
7

8.  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.
Organizational Behaviour(OB):
A background

9. 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
9

10. 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. 4.Examine CV’s.
2.Create a job holder profile. 5.Interviews.
3.Obtain applicants. 6.Other procedures.
Selecting the right person for the job

11. 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
11

12. 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
12

13. 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
13
13

14. 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
14

15. 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
Motivation
15

16. 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
Motivation
16

17. 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
17

18. 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
The Oldham-Hackman Job
Characteristics model
18

19. 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)
19

20. 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 20

21. 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
21

22. 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
22

23. 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
23

24. Influence on all stages of the Step Wise project
planning
24

25. 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
25

26. Step Wise project planning
 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
26

27. 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
27

28. 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
28

29. 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
29

30. ‘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’
30

31. 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
31

32. 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
32

33. 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
33

34. 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
34

35. 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
35

36. 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
36

37. 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.
37

38. 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 38

39. Organization and Team Structures
 Department Structure
How is department organized into teams?
 Team Structure
How are project teams structured?
39

40. 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 40

41. 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 41

42. Functional vs Project formats
 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
42

43. Team Structure
 Team Structure
 Denotes reporting, responsibility, and communication
structures in individual project teams
 Three team structures
 Chief Programmer
 Democratic
 Mixed team organizations
43

44. 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
44

45. 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
45

46. 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
46

47. 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
47

48. 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
48

49. 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
49

50. 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 50

51. Communication Genres
Same Place Different place
Same time
Meetings Telephone
Interviews etc., Instant messaging
Different times
Noticeboards E-mail
Pigeon-holes Voicemail
Documents
51

52. 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.
52

53. 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
53

54. 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
54

55. 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)
55

56. Coaching style matrix
Developing
team
members by
matching
your
supervision
to their needs
56

57. PMI examination content
PMI qualification
examination
content
57

58. 58