Summary of the core challenges

In order to analyse the areas that need more urgent action in operations, we will apply the concepts of market-qualifiers and order-winners from Hill 2005 and introduced by  (The Open University, 2012). Afterwards, we will analyse the limitations of growing operations or scalability

Qualifiers

It is defined as ’entitle it to be considered by a customer’; in other words, the minimum threshold to be accepted by a customer. The organisation currently meets some of these criteria demanded by the public tenders, such as the curriculum of the staff, competence and geographical location. An element that disqualifies the organisation is the speed of delivery, and therefore a limitation in the future of the company

Winners

The order-winners are the elements that are a decisive factor in the final decision to gain a customer. As a difference from the qualifiers, the level cannot be defined as a yes or no answer, but rather as a continuum scale. In this category, we can find the dependability of the organisation and the cost. As discussed previously, the price-per-hour is in the lower end of the average of the Dutch market, and therefore not a critical point for improvement. On the other hand, dependability has been an issue lately, caused mostly for the low speed of operations, the increased turnover of the personnel of the organisation and the difficulty to recruit and train new members.

Scalability

Last, we must address the scalability to improve revenue developing more projects. The main limitation to apply this solution is the lack of enough senior staff. All the senior members of the organisation are currently directly involved in several projects and already working overtime; therefore, no more projects can be accepted by the organisation.

The main issue and key improvement

We can make parallelism linking the course materials ideas about how a wrong layout is a waste of time and money  (The Open University, 2012). In our case, the problem resides in the digital world rather than in the physical, and we can discuss that is the wrong workflow or ‘digital layout’ the source of our waste. This issue was also identified by The Toyota Production System (Slack et al. 2007) as process waste.

In the current production process, we can identify direct process technology as those that are required to develop software solutions. In this category, we can place the compilers and integrated development editors (IDE). We can also identify indirect process technologies, as those that contribute to everyday operations. In this category, we can place the issue tracking software and testing framework.

The lack of homogenisation in both, direct and indirect process technologies is one of the factors of low performance of newcomers and the difficulty of moving resources between projects as needed, as the time is wasted to familiarise the newcomers with the technologies used in each project.

The current transformation process is very linear, with little reusability of both components and supporting software tools. Figure 1 provides an example of a typical operation.

Figure 1 Current production process

The process starts with the design of the software based on the requirements of the customer. This step will identify submodules that should be developed to meet those demands. Figure 1 identifies several components needed, which are called: A, B and C. The production of the modules is carried linearly due to the lack of enough staff that prevent parallelism of such tasks, and even in occasions is not uncommon for a delay in the start of a new component for the same reason.

I think that a migration from the workflow of Figure 1 to Figure 2 will result in increased speed and affecting the dependability positively.

Figure 2 Proposed production process

In the new system, the senior staff will be in charge of two steps: (1) identifying and improve core utilities that will be part of the catalogue for future projects and (2) the monitoring of the integration step. The proposed system will improve the speed, reducing the developing time of the standard blocks, while increasing the parallelism of the system.

We can expand saying that the scalability will improve, mainly for two reasons: (1) the reduction of the workload of the senior staff and (2) the reduced induction period achieved after the homogenisation of the direct and indirect process technologies.

We should mention that the new system could affect the current flexibility negatively, and the team should be aware of this, providing ways to customise the core elements and not incurring in the development of rigid solutions.

Last, the proposed model of moving from a 100% custom-made solutions to reuse of core components and personalisation have shown its effectiveness in corporations of software development in the field of telecommunications in Finland (Mathiassen and Vainio, 2007)

Strategy for implementation of the proposed improvement

The implementation of the reusability of the software components, by its nature, is a gradual or continuous process. The senior staff should monitor existing projects and well as new developments to try to migrate the most common use functionality into separate packages. The reason behind is that the people working with operations know more about the processes than anyone else.

Nonetheless, this change will introduce new internal mechanisms in the organisation, especially the concepts of internal customers and internal suppliers, depending on the point of view: a developer in the core team or a system integrator respectively.

A second challenge is to switch the monitoring activities of the financial department, with a strong project-view presently. We proposed a separate budget that should be prepared for the core team to develop and incrementally update the tools, the funds for the core team should come from the projects, as internal purchases of software blocks.

A different approach to implementation can be taken to regards direct and indirect technologies. It is the opinion of the author than a radical change will be best suited. If new tools are inserted in the company without the migration of old tools into the new ones, people will see the new products as one more of the collection. At the same time, migration of all existing issue tracking tools into the new selected issue tracking is needed if we plan to improve operations significantly, as an incremental approach will only add complexity to the existing ‘mess’ in operations with multiple tracking software.

Last, both improvements should be executed and therefore time and budget should be made available to senior staff, even at the cost of decreasing production for a short period. The alternative of waiting for idle time to implement the changes incurs in the risk of degrading the speed and dependability (which are qualifiers and winners respectively) to a level in which customers will be lost.

Working smart versus working harder (Himanshu, 2018)

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