Abstract
Software development has played a significant role in the evolution of organisations and society. Organisations are looking for new approaches to meet overall business objectives and technical expectations, while optimising software delivery, at reduced cost and overall risk. However, alarming obstacles exist that prevent organisations from continually evolving and achieving software delivery efficiency. One such obstacle is organisational silos and, because of their existence, corporates fail to fully integrate their software development activities to enable multiple teams to jointly develop, test, implement and maintain new applications more effectively and efficiently. This study aims to investigate how organisational silos can be broken down to enable software delivery flow.
To achieve this, the research utilises predominately qualitative research methods because of the need to study human activities to understand how individual software development practitioners develop software, and how teams correlate their contributions. Personal interviews are used as the primary research tool, with 25 people identified as worthy participants. Based on the interviews conducted this paper concludes that both an organisation’s culture and structure contribute significantly to the formation of silos within corporates. This is because an organisation can have silos because of how employees are organised (namely hierarchical and categorised), which fosters a culture of inward looking. Because of the presences of silos, the software development cycle is often divided into multiple processes that operate independently and there is a missed opportunity to perform work concurrently, which introduces delays and inefficiencies. Hence, there is a need for organisations to operate in a vastly different manner, which would entail significant employee engagement, shorter decision cycles and more collaboration at enterprise level through widespread adoption of agile (also known as agile-at-scale).
Therefore, for organisations looking to eliminate silos through the adoption of agile-at-scale, this study recommends the adoption of practices and principles from existing bodies of knowledge, namely Lean Agile and System Thinking. This is because lean...
M.Sc. (Informatics)