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Giving project teams more autonomy boosts productivity and customer satisfaction:
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."
[...] 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.
Journal Reference:
Narayan Ramasubbu and Indranil R. Bardhan. Giving project teams more autonomy boosts productivity and customer satisfaction, MIS Quarterly, 2021 [abstract]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday January 21 2022, @03:22PM (7 children)
Every techie grunt knows full well that the suits are a hindrance, not a help, to their ability to get anything done. Good bosses hire good people, check in periodically to make sure they have what they need, and other than that spend their time making sure that their people are left alone to do what they need to do.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 21 2022, @04:02PM (3 children)
Micromanagement is the best way to minimize productivity, and sometimes that's what the people at the top want: at least don't screw anything up worse than it already is.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday January 21 2022, @05:47PM (2 children)
I don't think it's so much the people at the top, as it is the PHB level managers that hinder production.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 21 2022, @06:12PM (1 child)
Depends entirely on the circumstances.
I worked at a mid-sized (1000 total employees, 500 at the hub where I was working) company where the "top floor guys" had fat quarterly bonuses based on the continued production of their established cash cow.
Anytime anything got construed in any way as a potential threat to the next quarterly bonus, directives came from the top to do crazy things like 100% internal auditing before proceeding on any future development. I suspect bigger companies, with more sophisticated leadership, do similar things but more subtly - harder to call out that they're doing exactly that: protecting their next big payout by stalling overall forward progress. I'd bet that sometimes they make those decisions without even being consciously aware of the reasons behind them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 21 2022, @07:36PM
> I'd bet that sometimes they make those decisions without even being consciously aware of the reasons behind them.
Many are born to rule. They're so insulated by inheritance and the old boy network, they never face consequences. See, e.g., the Tory party in the UK.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 21 2022, @05:47PM (2 children)
You're oversimplifying a little - but yeah. The boss doesn't need to be up your ass all day, every day. Depending on your organization, you probably need to see the boss, and talk to him two or three times a week. Some need less than that - possibly as seldom as once a month.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 21 2022, @07:38PM
Literally 75% of meetings with the boss are "Remind me what you're doing...?" and "What did we agree to last time?" and "I want to see more progress". An empty hierarchical pony show.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday January 22 2022, @12:18AM
That's where the "check in periodically" comes in: The best bosses I've ever had would stop by my desk about daily just to see how things were going ... and then get back to letting me do what I needed to do. Or they were just in the cube farm near me, so we could easily talk across the barriers.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.