During the fall semester of 2009, I set out to understand the managerial process of the open-source
software collaboration project Sakai1. This effort became my final project for the course Managing In
Information-Intensive Companies, taught by Morten Hansen. Using the framework for understanding
the innovation, collaboration, and decision making processes in organizations, I researched the inception
of Sakai, it’s early development, and it’s current status. I found that the success of their product at
Berkeley (bSpace) was based on the unique collaborative model of Sakai. So, I studied to governance of
the Sakai Project, with hopes of understanding how their organizational and collaboration models
affected their product.
The Sakai Project reorganized in 2007 and adopted a unique model of governance and collaboration in
order to address the following problems: 1) Collaboration: Distributed development can lead to project
silos. Tools need to be interoperable, and it is difficult for developers spread out across the world to
coordinate this. 2) Governance: Who makes the decisions? While bubble up development is the ideal,
who will ultimately make the decision about whether a new tool goes into the source code? Also, who
makes decisions about the requirements for the project?
I interviewed six people who were involved in the development, deployment or support of bSpace and
Sakai. Through the interviews, I attempted to understand the experience of key people at all levels of the
organizations, keeping in mind that the interviewees represented a small fraction of the people in those
levels. I found that in the previous governance model: there was not a clear separation between who
made the decisi...
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...growing group of global developers. This decision helped it
leverage the collaboration of the group for the development of a better product.
What were the constraints in implementing these changes? From what I could gather, resistance to these
changes didn’t come from individual, but from the organization itself. To explain, we can refer to the
concept of organizational inertia - large groups of people coordinating activities will have difficulty
implementing new changes in process and decision making, like a large ship has difficulty changing
course quickly. Most people I talked to expressed that the changes the Sakai Project has been making
since 2007 have been moving the organization in the right direction, albeit slowly. The newest concern
seemed to be about about the development of the latest version of their product, Sakai 3, than
governance.
Rouda, R. H., & Kusy, M. E., Jr. (1996, May 4). MANAGING CHANGE WITH LARGE-SCALE, REAL-TIME INTERVENTIONS. Tappi Journal. Retrieved from http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~rouda/T5_LSRTOD.html
Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2013). Reframing Organizations (5th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
In 1967, Serge Kamf started a company called the “société pour la gestion et le traitement de l’information”, also known as Sogeti (Srivastara et al., 2014). Sogeti is an information technology consulting company that provides services including software development and testing, business analytics, product management, and more. By 2010, Sogeti was an international company with 20,000 employees and 200 locations (Srivastara et al., 2014). Despite the importance of teamwork in Sogeti’s work culture, the company was getting too large and disconnected for effective cross-company collaborations. In 2008, Luc-Francois, the CEO at the time, decided that Sogeti needed to undergo a transformation to prepare it for the future. After numerous discussions and brainstorming sessions, the team of leaders at Sogeti came up with TeamPark, a social platform software that would virtually connect Sogeti employees around the world. In this paper, we will analyze the strategies and leadership skills practiced by the Sogeti TeamPark leaders that revolutionized a company. The need for additional leadership strategies resulting from the transition
As you would imagine, having to look at our current processes and breaking each process down at micro level was a very daunting task for everyone involved in the project. After going through the progression of identifying which processes were potential changes, the leadership and project team members were tasked with communicating the findings and what the official implementation plan for these changes would look like. From my perspective, this was the biggest pitfall for the team. Our communication plan was not as detailed as it should have been in terms of illustrating value to other team members and leaders within the division. In addition, the project and leadership teams set unrealistic processing goals for team members. Thus, minimizing the division’s potential to create short-term wins for individual team members, as well as for the organization as a whole. Therefore, one could identify our breakdown occurring during the second cluster of Kitters’ Eight Steps of Change. Thus, this paper will attempt to address how change management can help leadership implement a change within the organization through analysis and
The Council also consisted of government leaders with non-production responsibilities, such as internal and external affairs, finance, defense, health, education and welfare. The coordination of the ministers plans and decisions went two ways. First, the groups were supervised by a small number of senior party leaders, whom were called “overlords” that appointed deputies and formed an inner cabinet. Second, the detailed coordination of ministerial plans was routed through the State Planning Commission, which is an advisory body with ministerial status.
During my time in placement I got the opportunity to take part in fun activities with the service users which enabled me to build relationships with each of them and also developed my commu...
...approached this with the same confidence I use in my substantive position I would have benefitted a lot more from the experience and given the service user more of an opportunity to engage with me. I will ensure that in future instead of focusing upon their additional needs and limitations in their ability to communicate in certain ways I will concentrate on their preferred method of interaction and use that to engage them more fully (NOS 9, Pi. 1 and 2).
Also, this led to augmentation of the product design with information obtained by the market team. By attracting two paying development partners, TallyUp and Onset outperformed their efforts in a step enabling them to try their product and fine tune it. However, their decision to hire a CEO was a little early since their business model had not yet settled. Moreover, their product was not yet introduced in the market and not yet fully developed.
This paper will be broken down into six sections profiling each critical part of implementing and managing change in an organization. The sections included are; outline for plan creating urgency, the approach to attracting a guiding team, a critique of the organizational profile, the components of change, and how to empower the organization.
While developing a software many complex activities are required which in turn have dependencies along them. Large software projects require the involvement of programmers, documentation specialists, program managers, architects, database analysts, system analysts, , and trainers and last but not the least testers. Along with their independent responsibilities these persons are also responsible to maintain and keep a check on the software system quality as well.
Oakland, S.J. and S.J. Tanner. A new framework for managing change . 2007. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/ViewContentServlet?Filename=Published/EmeraldFullTextArticle/Articles/1060190604.html. 04 March 2014.
Van de Ven, A.H. and Poole, M.S. (1995) defined “Change” as a type of event, which is an empirical observation of difference in form, quality, or stat over time in an organisational entity. The entity may be an ...
2) Business level: This level includes the sub position or Head of department under the corporate level.
One of the first scholars to describe the process of organizational change was Lewin (1974). He described change as a three-stage process that consists of unfreezing, moving and freezing stage. During the unfreezing stage the organizations become motivated to change by some event or objective. The moving stage is like implementation when the organization actually makes the necessary change. Furthermore the freezing stage is reached when the change becomes permanent. Organizational change has also...
My interest in the field of information management was triggered when I began developing small projects. As a group, we designed and developed a few mid-term projects in third year of engineering – a banking system portal, a website for my college, and a training and placement office software. I was the lead in developing a hotel management system, which was awarded the “Best Project” prize at the intra college project competition. These projects made