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Corporate governance; General management; Strategy

Post Graduate/MBA

Tata Group is a conglomerate having 29 listed companies with consolidated revenues of $103bn in FY2016. On October 24, 2016, Cyrus Mistry, chairman of the group has been replaced in an unceremonious way from this job, in a boardroom coup, without being given any opportunity to explain his case. This news arrived in the media between October 2016 and December 2016 and wide and public debates took place on the corporate governance practices of Tata Group. Mistry’s ouster was attributed to non-performance, unethical practices and non-compliance to Tata culture. This case presents the Tata Group performance before Mistry, at the ouster of Mistry, the major trouble points and the corporate governance activities that took place in this saga at Tata Group. The real losers in this battle were the investors who lost $12bn between October 2016 and December 2016. Many of Tata Group companies’ stocks plunged.

The students will learn corporate governance, know how a non-listed company control and govern listed entities, know the way performance of a chairman of a company has been evaluated and learn how ethical and cultural issues impact the performance of chairman of a listed company.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS: 11: Strategy

The purpose of this paper is to classify the factors affecting the performance of software development teams and stress the soft (non‐technical) factors affecting the performance of software development teams.

This paper is based on the thorough secondary research and literature review of the past empirical studies published in reputed journals. The methodology followed is the secondary research based on extensive literature review of empirical studies done and analysis of the findings of those studies and categorization of the factors affecting the software development team performance. Literature review and analysis were carried out between March 2010 and March 2011.

It was found that the soft factors such as team climate, team diversity, team innovation, team member competencies and characteristics, top management support and team leader behavior, have an effect on software development team performance. Mutual trust and communication effectiveness are found to be the prioritized factors affecting the software development team performance.

The conclusions made are based on the past empirical studies found in the literature. A primary research can be done by taking these soft factors into consideration and implications or observations can be found on the software development team's performance.

The original contribution of this paper is the classification of factors affecting the performance of software development teams. This contribution also highlights the soft factors such as team climate, which was not discussed much in the literature. It also highlights trust and communication, for example, as leading factors affecting the software development team performance.

Existing models of critical success factors of software projects have less concentration on communication, team, project management and product related factors. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model of critical success factors (CSFs) for software development projects, categorize the success factors, finding the factors in each category and highlighting the product, team, project management and communication factors as important categories of success factors for software projects.

A conceptual model and seven categories of success factors comprising a total of 80 success factors for software development projects were identified based on the thorough literature review. These 80 factors are collected based on their importance to software projects and their repeated occurrence in the literature related to CSFs. Based on the occurrence of the success factor in the literature, each category comprising top five success factors are identified as critical success factors for software projects. Based on these seven categories of success factors a conceptual model was developed.

A total of 35 CSFs from seven CSF categories are identified from secondary research of the CSFs for software development projects. The identified CSFs include communication in project, top management support, clear project goal, reliability of output, project planning, teamwork, project team coordination, quality control, client acceptance, accuracy of output, reduce ambiguity, maximize stability, realistic expectations and user involvement. Project management, product, team and communication factors are identified as important categories of success factors for software projects.

Different categories of critical success factors such as product, project management, team and communication, which were not highlighted or categorized earlier in the literature are discussed in this current work.

This research is definitely useful for organizations working on software projects. The project managers working in the industry can benefit from the mentioned critical success factors and the categories of factors by concentration on them while planning and executing software projects.

The conceptual model, categorization of CSFs, identifying 35 CSFs for software projects and highlighting product, team and communication factors are major contributions of this research work.

Software process tailoring (SPT) is a knowledge- and learning-intensive activity in which a software project team customizes its software development processes to accommodate project particularities. Because SPT critically influences how a project is conducted, SPT performance should be investigated, but the extant literature lacks investigations into how team knowledge mechanisms and team environments contribute to SPT performance. To fill this gap, this study looks into a team's absorptive capacity (AC) and combines a transactive memory system (TMS) and team climate inventory (TCI) to develop a theoretical research model to facilitate the understanding of SPT performance.

This paper is a conceptual study that uses the propositional methodology with a focused review of existing literature pertaining to SPT, AC, TMS and TCI to develop a theoretical model to foster SPT performance. Because this study is conceptually established, further empirical research and studies are also suggested.

The proposed model provides guidance for firms conducting SPT. It also contributes to future research aiming to empirically understand the mechanisms behind the identified team-based knowledge and environmental enablers in the dynamic team learning process that lead to superior SPT performance.

The proposed model provides a fresh look at the dynamic capabilities theory in SPT and innovatively identifies a team's dynamic learning process to show how a team can conduct effective SPT through AC and facilitated by TMS. Environmental climates characterized by vision, participative safety, task orientation and support for innovation act as positive moderators in promoting the team dynamic learning process.