The Impact of Missing Skills on Learning and Project Performance

Author(s):  
James Jiang ◽  
Gary Klein ◽  
Phil Beck ◽  
Eric T.G. Wang

To improve the performance of software projects, a number of practices are encouraged that serve to control certain risks in the development process, including the risk of limited competences related to the application domain and system development process. A potential mediating variable between this lack of skill and project performance is the ability of an organization to acquire the essential domain knowledge and technology skills through learning, specifically organizational technology learning. However, the same lack of knowledge that hinders good project performance may also inhibit learning since a base of knowledge is essential in developing new skills and retaining lessons learned. This study examines the relationship between information system personnel skills and domain knowledge, organizational technology learning, and software project performance with a sample of professional software developers. Indications are that the relationship between information systems (IS) personnel skills and project performance is partially mediated by organizational technology learning.

2011 ◽  
pp. 1445-1457
Author(s):  
James Jiang ◽  
Gary Klein ◽  
Phil Beck ◽  
Eric T.G. Wang

To improve the performance of software projects, a number of practices are encouraged that serve to control certain risks in the development process, including the risk of limited competences related to the application domain and system development process. A potential mediating variable between this lack of skill and project performance is the ability of an organization to acquire the essential domain knowledge and technology skills through learning, specifically organizational technology learning. However, the same lack of knowledge that hinders good project performance may also inhibit learning since a base of knowledge is essential in developing new skills and retaining lessons learned. This study examines the relationship between information system personnel skills and domain knowledge, organizational technology learning, and software project performance with a sample of professional software developers. Indications are that the relationship between information systems (IS) personnel skills and project performance is partially mediated by organizational technology learning.


2009 ◽  
pp. 2247-2261
Author(s):  
James Jiang ◽  
Gary Klein ◽  
Phil Beck ◽  
Eric T.G. Wang

To improve the performance of software projects, a number of practices are encouraged that serve to control certain risks in the development process, including a lack of essential skills and knowledge related to the application domain and system development process. A potential mediating variable between the lack of skill risk and project performance is the ability of an organization to acquire the essential domain knowledge and technology skills through learning, specifically organizational technology learning. However, the same lack of knowledge that hinders good project performance may also inhibit learning. This study examines the relationship between information system personnel skills and domain knowledge, organizational technology learning, and software project performance with a sample of professional software developers. Indications are that the relationship between information systems (IS) personnel skills and project performance is partially mediated by organizational technology learning.


Author(s):  
Mehreen Sirshar ◽  
Muneeza Khalid

Scope, time, and cost permanently effects each other and most of Information Technology projects fails due to these three factors. Scope shifting mostly occur due to time and cost. At project start, lack of understanding of project and product scope is focal involvement that leads to unsuccessful projects. Complete software scope definition determines quality of project. Defining the customer requirement and the definite scope of project has key role for implementation of project management. The complications originates when systems are developed from impractical expectations and misunderstanding requirements. These problems are cause of many changes, occurs in system development and leads to poor scope management. Scope creep is one of the momentous prompting parameter on the success of project. The failure in manage scope creep leads for 80 percent of software projects failure. However, using agile approach the impact of scope creep on projects become insignificant. A correctly distinct scope tends us to develop a quality product, within identified plans and decided cost to the stake-holders.


Author(s):  
Leanah Alsaber ◽  
Ebtesam Al Elsheikh ◽  
Sarah Aljumah ◽  
Nor Shahida Mohd Jamail

Adapting users need to fulfill their requirements and delivering products to be on time within the planned cost, is critical matter that all software project managers (SPM) put the highest priority for it while considering the users satisfaction at the same time. Agile methodology is one of the solutions provided by software engineers (SE), to get the customers involved in the system development life cycle (SDLC) to avoid the risk nonconformance cost. Yet SPM’s still facing the nonconformance costs and the dynamic changes, and the root cause of the issue is not pointed on to find a solution for it. This undertaking research aimed at determining whether software developers understand scrum rules. In addition, how does this knowledge gab affect the software projects success from the project management perspective. Furthermore, the engagement studied the impact of lack of enough knowledge on the topic to project delivery. The collected data from the qualitative and quantitative methods, which was conducted with scrum teams who worked in the <span>health information system</span> (HIS), Educational solutions, and Governmental solutions has showed deviations in organizational practices and team conflicting, competition, and pressure as well as declined product quality.


2020 ◽  
Vol V (IV) ◽  
pp. 48-59
Author(s):  
Ashfaq Ahmad ◽  
Nisar Ahmad ◽  
Nadia Malik

Effective control of risk factors ensures the performance of projects in any industry. Risk factors can influence software projects of any size and type. This research aims to identify and examine different risk factors associated with projects in the software industry. The relationship between Software Project Risks (SPRs) and Perceived Project Performance (PPP) measures is determined. This study is based on a survey approach, and a questionnaire is used to record opinions and responses from 199 software professionals working in the Pakistan software industry. The results showed that the association between SPRs and PPP measures is statistically significant, and there exist a positive relationship. It is concluded that an increase in understanding of SPRs can increase PPP measures used to evaluate the software project. The results will help researchers and professionals in understanding the impact of different risk factors on software projects' perceived performance.


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 66-76
Author(s):  
Nenad Jukic ◽  
Miguel Velasco

Defining data warehouse requirements is widely recognized as one of the most important steps in the larger data warehouse system development process. This paper examines the potential risks and pitfalls within the data warehouse requirement collection and definition process. A real scenario of a large-scale data warehouse implementation is given, and details of this project, which ultimately failed due to inadequate requirement collection and definition process, are described. The presented case underscores and illustrates the impact of the requirement collection and definition process on the data warehouse implementation, while the case is analyzed within the context of the existing approaches, methodologies, and best practices for prevention and avoidance of typical data warehouse requirement errors and oversights.


Land ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 399
Author(s):  
Walter Musakwa ◽  
Trynos Gumbo ◽  
Gaynor Paradza ◽  
Ephraim Mpofu ◽  
Nesisa Analisa Nyathi ◽  
...  

National parks play an important role in maintaining natural ecosystems which are important sources of income and livelihood sustenance. Most national parks in Southern Africa are managed by their states. Before 2007, Gonarezhou National Park was managed by the Zimbabwe Parks Management and Wildlife Authority, which faced challenges in maintaining its biodiversity, community relations and infrastructure. However, in 2017 the Frankfurt Zoological Society and the Zimbabwe Parks Management and Wildlife Authority formed an innovative partnership under the Gonarezhou Conservation Trust (GCT). This study examines the relationship between GCT management, Gonarezhou National Park stakeholders and communities as well as the impact of the relationship on biodiversity and ecosystems. The study also highlights challenges faced and lessons learned in managing Gonarezhou as a protected area. To obtain the information, key informant interviews, Landsat satellite imagery, secondary data from previous studies and government sources were utilized. The results indicate that the concerted efforts of the Gonarezhou Conservation Trust to manage the park are starting to bear fruit in improving biodiversity conservation, ecosystem management and engaging communities. However, challenges such as governance obstacles, problematic stakeholder management, maintaining trust in community relations, ensuring sustainability, managing the adverse impacts of climate change and human-wildlife conflicts must still be navigated to ensure the park’s sustainable management. Notwithstanding challenges, we argue that a partnership arrangement such as the Gonarezhou Conservation Trust is a desirable model that can be applied in national parks in Zimbabwe and Africa for better biodiversity management and tourism.


Author(s):  
Kenneth R. Ohnemus

The sheer volume of information, 15 books and over 1,500 graphics, contained in CSC's corporate system development methodology, Catalyst,sm has created a need to have this information on-line. On-line access, it was felt, would dramatically impact productivity. To help support users and facilitate the use of Catalyst, the Microsoft (MS) help system, in conjunction with RoboHELPTM, was used to put Catalyst online in a hypertext format. Incorporating feedback and usability concerns was key in determining how its more than 20,000 users could best utilize this product. The design evolved over several months and in its final form also extended the limited functionality of the MS help system, providing a more robust product. This paper discusses the challenges surrounding the design of a large windows help system, approximately 53 MB in size (33 MB when fully compressed). The lessons learned can form the basis for creating an effective help system development process for meeting users' needs.


2017 ◽  
Vol 02 (02) ◽  
pp. 1750007
Author(s):  
Taiga Mitsuyuki ◽  
Kazuo Hiekata ◽  
Takuya Goto ◽  
Bryan Moser

For software development, especially massive software systems, a waterfall process is used traditionally. A waterfall process can be highly effective on the condition that a master plan is fixed and the possibility of changes and uncertain rework is low. However, in software development projects, many kinds of reworks occur corresponding to uncertain requirement changes and program bugs. In addition, with the advent of cloud-based software platforms and continuous development operations, it is possible to develop a software system while operating the system. To respond to this situation, software development projects often adopt an agile process. Agility may allow conditional response to uncertain rework, yet at the same time it may be difficult to control the achievement of known project targets. Recently, many cases of adopting mixed processes including waterfall and agile have been reported in the massive software development projects. In this paper, we argue that the mixed process architecture should be designed, considering the scale of the targeted software project, the culture of organization, the probability of uncertain requirement changes, and so on. This paper proposes a methodology of evaluating the impact of waterfall, agile, and mixed project architectures by using process simulation. A project architectural approach is evaluated with a simulator which includes a software reliability growth model and uncertain rework driven by requirement change and error propagation. The proposed methodology was applied to a development project for a simple shopping website. The results showed that the proposed methodology allows exploration of partial agile adoption depending on the nature of the system development project, including its scale and chances of change. For example, in this paper, if the scale of the project is small, the positive effect of increasing agility by adopting agile processes is low. On the other hand, if the scale of the project is large, the effect of increasing agility by adopting agile process can increase. Furthermore, it became clear that it is important to not apply an agile process blindly, but instead to design a mixed project architecture considering the number of errors and development schedule targets across the project scope.


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