Profiling product and organizational performance
- Reference number
- SM13-0007
- Start and end dates
- 140401-151231
- Amount granted
- 613 336 SEK
- Administrative organization
- Göteborg University
- Research area
- Information, Communication and Systems Technology
Summary
Technological development in the last three decades has led to software being the major discriminating factor of a success of products on the market. It became a common practice to use software for that purpose in products like cars and telecom nodes. In this project, we plan to change the way in which companies work with constant development of the excellence of their software products. Traditionally, software development projects get insight (feedback) about their ways-of-working and decisions through customer feedback. The feedback is analyzed and is used in new software development projects. The change which we plan to explore in this project is to define how software development practices (ways-of-working) relate to existing and new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs like status, progress, early warning, etc.) and to the feedback (customer feedback, product performance in field). This change will allow the company to monitor such factors in ways-of-working and new KPIs that will make the feedback being better with every project/product. The project will include case studies, interviews, prototype development and evaluation at companies and with university researchers. The expected outcomes are lists of excellence factors, prototypes of measurement systems and strategies how to achieve excellence by using the developed key performance indicators monitoring the excellence factors.
Popular science description
Software is one of the cornerstones of our society. Almost all products include software or are developed or manufactured by machines using software. This pervasive nature of software is reflected in our society – the IT sector is very important for our economy and for our growth. It is important today and we need to make sure that it will remain important in a longer term. This means that our software development companies need to be extremely competitive and innovative to assure a sustainable growth. The companies developing software need to be steps ahead before their competitors, understand the market, predict how it will evolve and most importantly – shape the future market. In this project, we intend to develop new methods for companies working with software products to be able to understand their markets better, to predict it and to spread this information in efficient ways throughout their organization. We intend to provide the companies with ways to quickly identify strategic goals at the top levels (e.g. super-safe cars) and communicate them to individual software engineers (e.g. percent of increase in memory consumption of the software). Volvo Car Corporation, Ericsson and University of Gothenburg plan to create methods that will improve their organizational performance and will help others to improve their performance. Thanks to the results of this project the companies will be able to develop safer and more innovative cars and smarter telecom networks. They will be able to do it before their competitors and they will be able to efficiently communicate how to achieve these goals at all levels – from top management teams to individual software engineers and testers.