[Assignment] IONA case 2

Shane Errity, Nile Niall Yelverton and I list our findings, using the jump processes for Iona Case 2. The second half of the blog post outlines our solutions to the three key issues that we raised.

Issues:

Organisation Structure:

Business Model

 → Changed from people focused to product focused

Culture

 → Tight knit to dispersed teams (in different locations)

 → Culture of Wine and Cheese and informal Toners meetings, vanished.

 → ORBIX seen as a dead end job

ORBIX Focused:

Didn’t have a holistic view of  the company's lifecycle. (Racconn Chaos lifecycle paper)

Focused on a narrow viewpoint of just ORBIX didn’t consider how it interacted with everything else in the company.

 → This led to a cannibalism in profits

People in the company didn’t have a holistic view of the organisation, this can be seen by the quotes at the end of the Iona case 2. The Travelling Salesman example in Racconn paper, highlights how decisions are easily made if someone has all the information.

Expansion Strategy:

Linear approach to cope with a non-linear problem.

 → Orbix hired new people. Fredrick Brooks would argue this adds to the delay of the project.

 → On Call rota for engineers

 → Hiring more people only eroded profits

ART was the solution, it just  didn’t arrive soon enough

 → Every employee wanted to be working on the cutting edge of software, this made working on ORBIX seem like a dead end job, this added to engineer stress

Solutions:

Organisation Structure:

If IONA had a formal business model from the start, then the engineers would have been able to handle the quick expansion better.

ORBIX Focused:

Employees need to see/be thought the holistic view of the software development lifecycle and the ART expansion. Engineers wanted to be at the cutting edge and they didn’t realise the importance of their work with ORBIX to help ART succeed. They only had a narrow view that working with ORBIX was a ‘dead end job’

Expansion Strategy:

To cope with expansion, Iona should have changed the Orbix architecture towards a new technology paradigm, such as a service oriented architecture.