Shared Leadership in Software Project Team

INTRODUCTION

Software itself is a complex entity and in order to develop software and managing the team till successful completion of the project requires defined sets of complex actions with interpersonal skills and intelligence. Software project managers are facing a great deal of difficulties in adapting to the ever changing tools and techniques in order to stay attuned with others [1]. To meet those challenges a combination of interpersonal skills are required in a good manager.

Leadership is one of the key interpersonal skills that a good manager should have. Leadership is nothing but developing a vision and strategy and the skills of motivating people to achieve the goal [2]. In order to lead effectively a software development team one has to have some qualities and skills using which one can drive and motivate a team towards successful achievement of project goal as well as organizational goal. A good manager with extensive leadership quality drives the people from where they should be and how they should perform. Different leadership approaches may be applied in order to achieve that.

BACKGROUND STUDY

According to Arnold Bregt, “A project is a temporary activity with a starting date, specific goals and conditions, defined responsibilities, a budget, a planning, a fixed end date and multiple parties involved [3].” The Oxford English Dictionary defines “project” as “An individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned and designed to achieve a particular aim. A software project is collection of complex activities which has a defined purpose that is to develop a software product or service, which is realistic, to be completed in limited time and space, unique and can be assessed finally. In order to achieve the final result of the software project, it needs to be planned efficiently, and the person involved in those planning must has skills including planning, risk management, team motivation ability, able to properly manage time, keep the team member right on track and inspiring them to get the best output.

In other way, we can say a good manager needs to be a good leader. A blending of both can drive a team towards right direction and achieve the best output from the team.

A. Management

Management is the art of getting things done through and with people. According to Peter F. Drucker, “Management is work and as such it has its own skills, its own tools and its own techniques [4].” Management is managing a team with a specific objective. Good manager uses his own techniques in order to get the best output in possible shortest time. In case of software project management, the situation is not different but bit critical.

B. Leadership

In modern project management culture it is well-understood that only with administrative discipline cannot produce predictable and good results. Formally a manager, informally a leader has to have the capabilities in him to use his resources such as human, financial, physical and informational. Leader is not administrative personal rather then he is to motivate the team members in a way that they perform better with confidence and having trust on each other and also on the organization. A leader concentrates more on chemistry inside the team and tries to find the weakness of members and solves those using own ways.

According to William J. Rothwell and H. C. Kazanas Leadership is defined as directing the activities of a group toward a shared goal, the process of activities of an organized group towards goal achievement and the ability to go beyond traditional culture in order to start more adaptive evolutionary change process [5].

C. Team

A team is a group of people staying together in order to collaborate each other. This collaboration is aimed to reach a shared goal or task for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. A group of people is not necessarily always a team but a team is a group of people with a high degree of interdependence directed towards the achievement of a common target or completion of a job rather than just a group for administrative convenience. A group, by definition, is a number of individuals assembled together or having some unifying relationship with common goal.

Success of a good team depends on the deepness of the commitment of the members to each other that are commonly aimed to achieve the goal and also a manager is administrative where a leader is innovative, a manager is imitate where a leader is originate, a manager maintains and manages but a leader develops, a manages focuses on the processes and systems where a leader focuses on the people, a manager tries to control but a leader inspires the team members, manager does the things right and leader does the right things.

Leadership style and approaches vary depending on situation and type of team members.

LEADERSHIP

To lead a human organization requires managers, to work in a benevolent manner with their subordinates, helping them learn how to accomplish assigned work. The manager either in repeating Effort or in continuing effort is often the task expert and is fully qualified and skilled to perform any job within their managerial domain. If not, they can easily retain an advisor or consultant who fills this role. These traditional supervisors and managers are expected to make the hard decisions, even when others do not agree with their conclusions [6].

Because of the complexity and diversity of skills required in order to perform Single-Time Effort, it is impractical for the project manager to be the task expert of all kinds of work that must be done to fulfill the job with efficiency.

When one of this types of managers attempts to blindly dictate the team toward direction, they are quickly exposed by their impractical or unreasonable edits.

One the other way, a good manager works to solicit individual contributions, create consensus within the project team, facilitate the team decisions and create an environment where it is possible for the team members on the project to accomplish their work with a minimum of distractions. The modern Project Manager plans, organizes and controls the project with the team and not for the team [6].

In current world shared leadership sometimes becomes obvious. This requires mostly in case of remote teams. One of the examples of shared leadership can be lateral leadership.

A. Lateral Leadership

Fisher & Sharp characterize lateral leadership as getting things done (together) when you are not the boss [7]. The goal of lateral leadership is to enable one to achieve high-quality collaboration with colleagues, collaboration that produces high-quality and prospective results.

This can be introduced in software organizations in some situations. Sometimes it becomes necessary to play leading role by one out of people of same level or responsibility. In those situations lateral leadership can be introduced. When any problem or technological challenge rises and not all the members of the software group may have expertise in that area, members having skills and expertise in that technology may play the leading role in that situation. This also falls under situational leadership. But situation leadership differs from lateral leadership in one point. The Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory was created by Dr Paul Hersey, a professor and author of “The Situational Leader.” According to the theory, without using just one leadership style, good leaders change their style on situations such as maturity of the members being lead and the details of the task. Based on this theory, leaders should put more or less emphasis on the relationships with the people, depending on what is required in order to get the job done successfully.

B. Shared Leadership

Sharon Buckmaster in her overview paper entitled “Shared Leadership: What is it, why it is important, and who wants it anyway?” has categorized the leadership into three categories based on sharing styles [9]. The author stated that leadership of “share all” is advocating leadership and less tightly controlled and more unexpected possibilities are allowed. It involves high risk as there is a shift away from individual achievement towards shared responsibility and collective achievement.

Using examples given by Heifetz, from multiple fields including business, politics, and health care, the author defined leadership as an activity that can and should be performed at multiple positions in any social structure [10].

SHARED LEADERSHIP IN SOFTWARE PROJECT TEAM

Managing a software project team is getting harder day by day as managers are facing huge challenges such as knowledge sharing and storing within the organization and bringing in. Again one the great trends now days is project out sourcing or hiring remote developers. This concept of project outsourcing benefits an organization is several ways in respect of money, time, and so on. Shared leadership is well applied in this arena of software project management where work is shared.

Project co sourcing is a great example of shared leadership in software industry. One of the major changes in IT co sourcing concept is creating a duel project management hierarchy [11]. In this model, at all levels off-source personnel play the project leadership role. In order to gain the benefits of project out sourcing or co sourcing it becomes obvious that communication between two organizations needed to be improved. To achieve this, shared leadership model needed to be established. A duel project management hierarchy model has been proposed by Kate M. Kaiser and Stephen Hawk in their research. Let’s have a look at the model in the figure.

This model can be introduced in software project team where shared leadership is necessary. If we concentrate on the model we can see there are parallel team lead positions. Those person are to lead the development staffs where they can use their own intelligence and creativity. Even the project manager can also share some leading responsibilities.

In this model shared leadership is introduced in every level not only on the development team itself.

Now agile software development methodology has become popular and being used by industry as it benefits the team. Agile development is different from the traditional plan driven approaches as it emphasizes less on up-front plans and strict plan-based control and puts more emphasis on mechanisms for change management during the project [12]. Moreover, agile development relies on team members and their creativity rather than on processes [13]. Leadership is shared in a very good way in agile development. Since agile inspires self management, a great effect of this is it results more emotional attachment between team members and which drives them toward more care to their work which may lead to more creativity, helping each other, higher productivity and service quality [14].

Self management is one kind of shared leadership as not only a single leader leads the team, but every member leads the team and the team performs as a whole.

In order to have shared leadership in a team, members should have shared decision taking authority. When the leadership is shared by the team leaders then the leadership is rotated among the person depending on the key knowledge, skill and abilities to handle such situation facing them team at any given moment [15].

Team members should be allowed to lead in particular issues when they possess the knowledge needed to be shared among the members beside the project management or administrative responsibilities are carried out by the project manager as the different phases of the project [16]. According to Pearce [15] the team leader should be responsible for designing (and re-designing) the team, along with clarifying purpose, securing resources, articulating vision, selecting members, and defining team processes. A leader should also have the authority of managing the boundaries of the team. Team leaders should be selected based on the technical skills, expertise and also team leading capabilities. Again Pearce mentioned [15] that right people must be on the team in case of development of shared leadership and he also proposed the team should be small. Beside team leader must build trust and confidence in the team.

Researchers have put importance on training also in order to introduce shared leadership in a software team [17]. Researchers also mentioned that in order to successfully implement shared leadership not only the vertical leaders needed to be trained but also the team members will need training [15].

CONCLUSION

Many researchers have worked and still working on the shared management and shared leadership techniques, tried to find out the benefits and drawbacks of this and also they have done lots of analysis on how to introduce shared leadership in different types of organization and work group. But still there are some challenges in introducing shared leadership in different sectors such as software. Shared leadership is good only when the right person is present in the team otherwise shared leadership may cause project failure and often it is hard to be introduced as seniors sometimes may not feel comfortable working under the lead of a novice. Gender discrimination is also an issue in some situation. In the report researchers references are brought under consideration in order to make reasoning how the shared leadership is being used in different ways and how it can benefit the team.

REFERENCES

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