Project Management Practices In Indian Small Software Development Enterprises

Problem Statement

The smaller software companies play an important role in some of the economies of the world. Around ten employees work in 85 percent of the software companies that are based in Europe. They help in contributing around 93 percent of the work that is required by the IT companies and around 66 percent of the total employment comes from the business of software industry in Europe. According to the survey that was conducted in Denmark, it was found that around 89 percent of these companies employ less than ten employees in their companies. A similar survey that was carried out in USA during 2005 revealed that almost 80 percent of the companies that deals in publishing software and services related to computer programming hire less than ten employees (Galliers & Leidner, 2014). Moreover, in India the smaller IT companies represent around 85 percent of the software companies. The limited financial conditions and the skilled use of labor is less compared to the software companies that are large in nature. There is a tough competition and the process of development of this software are driven by time, nature of flexibility, risk orientation, unstructured planning process and a limited capacity for learning and absorption of knowledge. The smaller companies that are present in the developed countries face challenges such as low financial capital, project management competence is poor, lack of human resources and the lack in the innovative technologies that are present globally. Apart from these challenges, the small and the medium enterprises (SMEs) in countries like Pakistan and India that are developing faces problems such as the lack in the corporate governance within the organization, trade barriers, high levels of corruption and red-tapism including the legal obstacles. The software companies that are small in nature in developing economies have a limited access to the financial part because of the banking environment and the requirement of collateral against the capital issued by the banks, which is harsh in nature (Schwalbe, 2015).

There is however very little research conducted in the software engineering (SE) companies with respect to SSDEs in spite of having many companies and the impact that it creates on the economic level along with their characteristics. There are less number of literature available on SSDEs as well in the developing economies although the companies have a huge role in the software production lifecycle on a global basis. They act as supplier of software to some of the companies located in different parts of the globe (Stark, 2015).

Research Objective and Research Questions

The main aim of this research will be to understand the main issues that are related to the Project Management practices in SSDEs in developing countries such as India. The research will be based on mainly two question such as the actual practices in project management in SSDEs in India and the main challenges that are encountered by SSDEs in the project management process. This will be a part of the large research that will help in comparing the SE practices in developed and developing economies.

The assignment is organized in the following manner: Section 1 comprises of the introduction of the research proposal, which is followed by the problem statement, objectives of the research and the justification of the proposal along with the outcomes that will be expected. Section 2 will comprise of the conceptual framework, hypothesis of the research and the research methodology. The final section will consist of the interpretation, discussion and the findings of the research.

The number of software users have increased on a constant manner with the increase use of the most advanced software in functions such as communications, business industries, games and administration has made the development of the software far more complex and complicated. This has directly resulted in the creation of better approach towards the creation of these software unlike the traditional software making approach. It is no longer marginal in systems that are technical in nature but has become the important factor behind the business or the organizations. The features in the system are solely based on the functionality of the software rather than its characteristics, which has become the main factors for the software to survive in the competitive market. most of the people who use software in the modern world are non-professionals and these factors have led to new challenges in the development of the systems in the software. The important features of software depend on the factors of usability, robustness, integration and the simple way of installing it in the required sectors. Due to the widespread use of the software, the demands with respect to integration has increased to a greater extent. This has directly made an impact on the software as they became large and of greater complexity that there were problems in it such as: the time for completing the software project got delayed, which resulted in missing the deadlines. This affected the increase in the budget that was required for the project to be completed and the quality of the project was not met (Sanchez-Gordon & O’Connor, 2016).

Literature Review

The objective of this research proposal is to identify the main issues and the original PM practices in SSDSs in countries like India and Pakistan, which are developing. It will be based on the following research questions:

• RQ1: What are the actual project management practices in SSDSs in India?
• RQ2: What are the main challenges that the SSDSs face during the process of project management?
• RQ3: What are the strategies that are taken by SSDSs in countering these challenges?
• RQ4: What are the principles that will act as guiding light to improve the performance of SSDSs?

The concepts that will be required in understanding the thesis will be explained thoroughly in this following section.

• Project Management

It is the management that will help in understanding the application of knowledge, tools, skills and techniques to forecast the activities that will be required to achieve the goals that are set for the particular project. The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) states that the project needs to be completed within the stipulated time that will help in achieving the end goal by being a product, service or a target that the human being wants to achieve. In the year 1969, the Project Management Institute (PMI) was established, which helped in serving the project management (McFarlin & Sweeney, 2014). The year 1981 saw PMI take steps in establishing PMBoK, which acted as a guiding light to the project management by following the guidelines and the standards that are of best interest in the profession. It helps in discussing the managing of the projects, which covered topics including the life cycle, stakeholders of the project, influential power of the organization and the management skills that are required by the project manager. Project Management generally includes two phases such as scheduling and planning phase and the methods of controlling the project that is being undertaken (Seethamraju, 2015).

The planning of the software project is divided in to three generic approaches: the experience in the past, standard guidelines and the tools that are required for support. The project managers who are experienced depend on the experiences in the past to create their plans and takes help from the guidelines and the documents that are present from the projects that have been completed in the past (Kumar, 2014).

• Software Project

The software project consists of the unique opportunity of work that comes with a set of specifications that is required to complete the project at a specified time within a fixed cost. The primary stakeholder of the project are the customers or the party that will be going to use the system for its business requirement and will benefit from the added value of the system in the business. The secondary stakeholder of the project is the developer or the team that is building the software for the primary stakeholders to use it in their business or other endeavors (O’Connor & Laporte, 2014).

The failure or the success of the software is assessed in broadly three dimensions such as:

a) Cost- It refers to any particular part or fragment in the materials, supplies or the external contracts that is required in completing the project.

b) Time- It usually refers to the schedule of the project, which is inclusive of the duration that is required in completing the task by not missing out on the deadlines set by the managers.

c) Product performance- It refers to the various specifications, scope, quality or the standards that play an important part for the project to be planned entirely (Vijayasarathy & Butler, 2016).

• Project Environment

This aspect needs to be analyzed in a way that the project environment has affected the activities that was taken up in course of the particular project. For this investigation, the environmental factors that were considered are senior management, users, subcontractors and customers. The issues of the environment in relation to the topics that has been explored include:

• The goals or the limitations that are levied against the software project by the top management or the customers
• The demands of the users for instance, budget limitations or schedule and staffing constraints (Hoda & Murugesan, 2016)
• Experience of the user and the participatory role during the project
• Requirement stability
• Disagreement or agreement on the goals of the project
• Customers, users and the senior management’s influential power on the progress of the software
• Project development
• Usage of external person for the project
• Existence of an organization for distributing the development of the software (Nagarajan, Joseph & Sujatha, 2015)

The strengths and weaknesses of project management can be measured from the following variables:

• Experience of project management
• The effort and time given by the project manager for managing the activities
• The use of methods and tools for planning of the project
• Application of methods for controlling the project
• Requirement of responsibilities for managing the project activities
• Assurance of quality with respect to staffing and function (Niazi et al., 2015)

The skills that are related to project staff helps in influencing the project with respect to the development of the software. The information that has been collected has been done on the basis of the qualification of the team members and their experience in the practical area

• Experience that is related to programming language and with the methods and the tools
• Experience on the basis of development of the hardware that is used for the project
• The management capabilities of the personnel such as the availability of the staff and training of the members in the team
• The effort that is spent on communication for continuity within the team (Heeks, Subramanian & Jones, 2015)

The study for this research constitutes of SSDSs whose main business is to develop software and they are independently working comprising of not more than ten employees. The data has been collected from one of the developing counties that is Pakistan for this case.

The qualitative approach is reliable for this study because the approach is subjective in nature firstly, which aims to focus on the questions like ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ and secondly it will help in understanding the environment in which it operates. Additionally, this study also focusses on investigating the literature by looking strongly in to the literature, which will help in understanding the PM practices in SSDSs (Fuggetta & Di Nitto, 2014).

The Grounded Theory (GT) methodology has been used for this purpose, which will help in determining the Project Management practices in SSDSs. The process will involve the development of the codes that are associated with the data that has been collected, the categories in codes and their sub-categories along with integration and refinement of the theory. The secondary form of data has also been used for this research from the Indian Project Management Institute. The interview with the seven SSDSs from Pakistan has been labelled here anonymously as A to G (refer to the below table for more information). From each of the SSDSs, two employees were asked to participate, which included the project manager and the software developer (Mehta, Hall & Byrd, 2014).

SSDEs	Total Employees	Expertise	Software Shop Category	Interviewees
Software Shop A	8	Web application design and development (WAD & D)	Project Base	Project manager
Software Shop B	7	WAD & D	Project Base	Project manager
Software Shop C	6	WAD & D	Project Base	Project manager
Software Shop D	7	WAD & D	Project Base	Project manager
Software Shop E	8	WAD & D	Project Base	Project manager
Software Shop F	8	Financial Applications	Project Base	Project manager
Software Shop G	9	Financial Applications	Project Base	Project manager

(Source: Ulhas, Lai & Wang, 2016)

From the analysis conducted above, we identified six main characteristics of PM practices in SSDSs in India. They are as follows:

• Many intermediaries
• Non-Standard PM tools
• Customer Dictates
• Numerous Responsibilities
• End User has no access
• Lack in training of Project Management

The small companies in the country get majority of their business from the software development companies that are usually bigger and are located in Australia, UK and the US. However, one company exists in the country that tries to get hold of their business from the local Indian market. However, that particular SSDS pointed out that there is a huge scope of getting business locally as India has a better future for software development in the long run. According to the majority of SSDEs, they perceive the local market as immature and the business owners have no knowledge on how it could be beneficial for their business. In addition to that, they said that the clients who are locally based pay less for the websites (Sharma, 2014).  

The end consumers of the SSDEs in India who work for clients based in US, UK, South Africa or Australia consists of different online business such as online business that are small, online shopping portals, real estate business and the websites that deal with social networks. There are brick-and-mortar business clients as well and individuals such as reporters, celebrities, barbers, shop owners and designers (Highsmith, 2013). The SSDEs that cater to the Indian customers are mainly isolated from one another through various intermediate layers. These SSDSs may find their end customers in the freelance portals or websites. The clients who post the projects on these websites maybe located outside India and may belong to US, UK or other countries who gets their business from the clients available locally. The large projects are handled by other intermediary companies who hires an IT company to make the Requirement Specification Document (RSD) for more than one overseas company in Indian SSDSs (Stol & Fitzgerald, 2014).

The availability of PM tools and software development are on a large scale. These tools can be used for the software development life cycle (SDLC) that is engineering requirements, implementation, software testing and design. For the SSDSs, the respondents claim that the requirements are not met by the current PM tools that they use. The project managers have raised a concern that these tools take lots of time and are complex in nature. They require the tools that will save time and at the same time manage numerous web projects respectively. Some of the SSDSs have researched around five PM tools and customized them so that it can meet their requirements. This helped the project managers in organizing the tasks in an efficient manner. He can communicate with the clients and the developers and instruct the developers about the current project simultaneously (Sudhaman & Thangavel, 2015).

It can be seen that the clients often dictate the parameters such as cost and duration when they provide the project. They control the final outcome of the project as they have access to the PM tools that are being used by the SSDSs. For example, a client of company F has given access to PM Bubble, which is a necessary PM tool. The project manager of that organization can get the details such as the cost, starting and completion time and the comments regarding the project. He is required to constantly update the status of the project through the tools available. The SSDSs that are based on products have their own customer support system, which gathers feedback from the customers and that helps them in avoiding customer dictatorship (Khan & Azeem, 2014).

There are numerous responsibilities on the employees in SSDSs. The project managers play a participatory role in the development of software, testing of the software, managerial tasks and the development of business. Some of the SSDSs give the clients direct access to the developers, which helps the clients to provide valuable feedbacks on the status of the projects. This allows the clients to monitor and control their projects, which is the responsibility of the managers in the true sense. The clients in some cases takes up the responsibility of a project manager and handles his web development team. One of the surveyed project manager stated that the clients outsource them the website maintenance projects through the online tool and gives access to the managers about the details of the project (Samuel & Kumar, 2014).

In most of the cases, the client is the end user, but if the product has been done for a free market then the users and the customers have different identities. There is a high possibility that the needs of the client may differ from the needs of the end user. Thus, it is necessary to gather feedbacks from the end users during the process of development. In our study, the SSDSs however are secluded from the final user through various intermediaries. In fact, the customers who order the product rarely have any access. The intermediaries have the access and are isolated from the customers through various layers. In this manner, the managers in the SSDSs in Pakistan have little access to the original client that is required to run the PM process successfully (Bass, 2016).

The interviewees in our study are mostly owners of their company and they have a degree in Computer Science or possesses a degree in Information Technology. They do not possess any specific training and has switched their role from being a software developer who is experienced to PM. One of the project managers does not have a formal education in computer as he transferred his knowledge to software development from Chemical Engineering. In the beginning, he mastered Photoshop and other tools that are required for designing of website. He then gradually took up projects from the freelance websites that are available on the internet. When he got more involved and the business started to flourish, he took the decision of running a company. The project manager of company E holds a Master degree in Software Engineering and started his career as a software developer and after five years he swapped to become a PM. This proves that the project managers gather confidence from the projects that they have handled in the past (Babb, Hoda & Norbjerg, 2014).

Conclusion 

Thus, it can be concluded from the results that the SSDSs that are located in Pakistan face many challenges in the global as well as on the local context. The local challenges include multiple responsibilities, the lack of tools required by PM to fulfill the requirements, lack of proper training and the unavailability of end-users who plays an important role in the success of the project. On the global context, they face challenges like dictatorship by the customers and communication problems with the PM activities. The project managers in SSDSs have little knowledge about the techniques laid down in PMBoK and they show a lack of interest in learning. The clients who are overseas have more than one intermediary layers, which has given rise to a complex arrangement of software development globally. This has led to the further research that will explore the software production on a global scale and production arrangements. These observation act as a motivating factor, which will help in conducting systematic comparisons in developed and developing countries related to SSDSs.

References

Babb, J., Hoda, R., & Norbjerg, J. (2014). Embedding reflection and learning into agile software development. IEEE software, 31(4), 51-57.

Bass, J. M. (2016). Artefacts and agile method tailoring in large-scale offshore software development programmes. Information and Software Technology, 75, 1-16.

Fuggetta, A., & Di Nitto, E. (2014, May). Software process. In Proceedings of the on Future of Software Engineering (pp. 1-12). ACM.

Galliers, R. D., & Leidner, D. E. (2014). Strategic information management: challenges and strategies in managing information systems. Routledge.

Heeks, R., Subramanian, L., & Jones, C. (2015). Understanding e-waste management in developing countries: Strategies, determinants, and policy implications in the Indian ICT sector. Information Technology for Development, 21(4), 653-667.

Highsmith, J. (2013). Adaptive software development: a collaborative approach to managing complex systems. Addison-Wesley.

Hoda, R., & Murugesan, L. K. (2016). Multi-level agile project management challenges: A self-organizing team perspective. Journal of Systems and Software, 117, 245-257.

Khan, S. U., & Azeem, M. I. (2014). Intercultural challenges in offshore software development outsourcing relationships: an exploratory study using a systematic literature review. IET software, 8(4), 161-173.

Kumar, N. (2014). National innovation systems and the Indian software industry development. Innovation in India: Combining Economic Growth with Inclusive Development, 143.

McFarlin, D., & Sweeney, P. D. (2014). International Management: Strategic Opportunities & Cultural Challenges. Routledge.

Mehta, N., Hall, D., & Byrd, T. (2014). Information technology and knowledge in software development teams: The role of project uncertainty. Information & Management, 51(4), 417-429.

Nagarajan, R., Joseph, A. V., & Sujatha, S. (2015). Behavioural aspects of software project management-in-house software development. Indian Journal of Science and Technology, 8(S3), 1-9.

Niazi, M., Mahmood, S., Alshayeb, M., & Hroub, A. (2015). Empirical investigation of the challenges of the existing tools used in global software development projects. IET Software, 9(5), 135-143.

O’Connor, R. V., & Laporte, C. Y. (2014). An innovative approach to the development of an international software process lifecycle standard for very small entities.

Samuel, R. D., & Kumar, N. S. (2014). Factors determining the enterprise resource planning project-success in small and medium enterprises: Evidence from Indian cases. World Applied Sciences Journal, 31(31), 5-11.

Sánchez-Gordón, M. L., & O’Connor, R. V. (2016). Understanding the gap between software process practices and actual practice in very small companies. Software Quality Journal, 24(3), 549-570.

Schwalbe, K. (2015). Information technology project management. Cengage Learning.

Seethamraju, R. (2015). Adoption of software as a service (SaaS) enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Information systems frontiers, 17(3), 475-492.

Sharma, D. C. (2014). Indian IT outsourcing industry: Future threats and challenges. Futures, 56, 73-80.

Stark, J. (2015). Product lifecycle management. In Product Lifecycle Management (pp. 1-29). Springer International Publishing.

Stol, K. J., & Fitzgerald, B. (2014, May). Two’s company, three’s a crowd: a case study of crowdsourcing software development. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 187-198). ACM.

Sudhaman, P., & Thangavel, C. (2015). Efficiency analysis of ERP projects—software quality perspective. International Journal of Project Management, 33(4), 961-970.

Ulhas, K. R., Lai, J. Y., & Wang, J. (2016). Impacts of collaborative IS on software development project success in Indian software firms: a service perspective. Information Systems and e-Business Management, 14(2), 315-336.

Vijayasarathy, L. R., & Butler, C. W. (2016). Choice of Software Development Methodologies: Do Organizational, Project, and Team Characteristics Matter?. IEEE Software, 33(5), 86-94.