Giving project teams more autonomy boosts productivity and customer satisfaction

Date:
January 19, 2022
Source:
University of Texas at Austin
Summary:
Software development teams given the freedom to tackle their
projects in whatever ways they choose are more productive and
have more satisfied customers than teams that follow a central
corporate standard, according to new research.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Software development teams given the freedom to tackle their projects
in whatever ways they choose are more productive and have more satisfied customers than teams that follow a central corporate standard, according
to new research from The University of Texas at Austin.


==========================================================================
The research suggests that organizations that take a hands-off approach
to the structure and governance of project teams create an environment
of creative flexibility. This built-in flexibility makes teams more
responsive to needed changes in the software they're building, boosting performance and customer satisfaction.

"By giving greater autonomy to your teams, you allow them to exercise
greater judgment about what would actually work based on their project requirements," said Indranil Bardhan, a professor of information, risk
and operations management at UT Austin's McCombs School of Business and co-author of the study. "We show there's no one right way of achieving
superior project performance, no one-size-fits-all." The findings appear
in MIS Quarterly.

Bardhan and co-author Narayan Ramasubbu of the University of Pittsburgh
tested the performance of both agile and traditional project teams over
50 months in a real-world policy experiment at a major software company
based in India. The company had 125,000 software developers around the
world working on projects that adhered to an ideal operations profile
closely monitored through a central unit.

Senior company directors wanted to learn whether greater autonomy for
software development teams would hurt or help performance. For the study,
they implemented a policy change granting greater autonomy to certain
teams and agreeing to provide data on key performance measures -- for both autonomous and nonautonomous teams -- before and after the policy change.

From 2013 to 2018, Bardhan and Ramasubbu tracked productivity and
customer satisfaction on 461 projects. Managers on 146 projects were
granted autonomy to design their projects the way they wanted using
three main controls: location and time differences among team members,
level of process diversity (such as lean or structured), and level of managerial control.

"Managers of autonomous teams could each choose what type of structure
worked well for them and their project team, versus having something
dictated to them by a central point of contact," Bardhan said.

Software developers measure productivity in function points -- a useful
proxy for the software's functionality. The more function points a product
has, the more value it adds to the software. Value added increased 39%
for teams that switched to an autonomous structure compared with projects
that did not.

Customer satisfaction also increased. The agile teams' ratings increased
2.95% as a result of the policy change, "which was pretty substantial,"
Bardhan said.

special promotion Explore the latest scientific research on sleep and
dreams in this free online course from New Scientist -- Sign_up_now_>>> academy.newscientist.com/courses/science-of-sleep-and-dreams ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Texas_at_Austin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Narayan Ramasubbu and Indranil R. Bardhan. Reconfiguring for
Agility:
Examining the Performance Implications for Project Team Autonomy
Through an Organizational Policy Experiment. MIS Quarterly, 2021
[abstract] ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220119135024.htm

--- up 6 weeks, 4 days, 7 hours, 13 minutes
* Origin: -=> Castle Rock BBS <=- Now Husky HPT Powered! (1:317/3)