How do contemporary organisations deal with the problems you've identified in the case?
What evidence can you find to solve, support and justify your (eventual) recommendations?
Are there examples of current practice in industry where the issue was resolved and if so how?
The IONA Case
The following example question statements were inspired by the IONA Case and illustrate the wide variety of potential avenues for investigation.
- What various practices are commonly used in teams today, now, in industry?
- What is Scrum? Reported problems with Scrum?
- What other lifecycle approaches are used in contemporary organisations (e.g. Lean, Kanban, Lean-Kanban, Water-scrum-Fall, Dev-Ops, FDD)?
- What markets are dependent on software standards?
- What software standards are integral to different markets?
- What are best-of-breed approaches to knowledge management, best in class tools, and the reported limitations?
- Find examples of design management approaches, team and management techniques that I can apply?
- Is there evidence of using metrics in some way that results in positive culture change in organisations?
- What are typical figures for leadership turnover in organisations, divisions, teams?
- What are typical norms for contact between customer and supplier, interacting around requirements, around problems, around sales etc?
- What are current norms for team size, activity-task specialism, organisational structure, communication-coordination strategies?
- What is current practice for organising NPD (new product development) versus operational/maintenance projects?
- Has the emergence of Dev-Ops changed the way products are managed/designed/developed?
- Find examples of organisational structure employed in contemporary organisations?
- What tools are used to capture the customer-supplier interface? What data is typically gathered, how, what is it used for etc?
- Is consulting or professional services capability identifiable within the contemporary software firm?
- What are industry norms around consulting/professional services in digital?
- What are current norms for firms cost structure across ”pure R&D”, NPD, maintenance, and operations?
- Are there typical turnover rates for software/IT professionals; in Ireland, India, Israel, Vietnam, USA...?
