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The office we once knew is gone. But many employers and employees can’t decide what’s next. This has led to inconsistent flexible work policies, half-empty office buildings, costly attempts at downsizing, and frustrated employees. People scratch their heads and ask: “What is the point of our office today?”I have been consulted as an expert in... Continue Reading →
Remote working has been a hot topic and many would like to know more about it. This is a summary of research insights on the perceived productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Brief description of the research and evidence: To understand work from home, we analyzed data from six corporate surveys from four Scandinavian companies and... Continue Reading →
A while ago I was asked by Jens Coldewey to give an interview on intellectual capital. An interview that runs electronically, in a written form. It was a very interesting experience, I must admit. As for the result, judge yourself! Jens: You are researching knowledge in outsourcing and offshoring relationships. What is the basic model you're... Continue Reading →
And again, together with my colleague Nils Brede Moe we decided to summarise our learnings about using agile methods in distributed projects from research in a book. Through our research, we see many companies still struggle by experimenting and adjusting their tactical approaches, learning through failure, and sometimes failing to diagnose the challenges and loosing time... Continue Reading →
The topic of cultural differences has always interested me and I found interesting the work of Geert Hofstede who has systematized the roots of cultural differences into five dimensions. I was particularly intrigued to see that ethnic Latvians are more like Scandinavians and that Latvia culturally belongs to the Northern Europe and not Eastern Europe.... Continue Reading →
My current research interests are related to understanding the scalability of agile principles in large-scale distributed projects. The core principles we study are autonomy, self-management and self-governance. In April this year we have started a new research project looking into team autonomy in multi-team multi-site projects. The first study conducted indicates that teams receive different... Continue Reading →
A couple of years have passed since we started quantifying the bottom-line costs of offshoring. I must say that doing it right is a very hard work. I am proud to share the next data point – a Swedish company (anonymously referred to as SwedCo) that develops complex software intensive systems and has on-boarded Indian developers on... Continue Reading →
In the new issue of IEEE Software (Nov/Dec 2016) Ricardo Britto, Lars-Ola Damm and I share a story of architects working with remote teams at Ericsson. We have followed a case of a large-scale monolithic legacy product development trying to understand how new teams are onboarded and improving over time, and whether the company will be able to... Continue Reading →
An opinion article has appeared in Dagens Industri as a response to the recently trending debate of whether or not to move more R&D work to lower cost locations. What follows is a short overview of the motivation behind the article. What is the key message of the article? Offshoring does not necessarily lead to cost-savings. Moving... Continue Reading →
When comparing the hourly costs of software engineers in high cost versus low cost countries, one may wonder whether there is any good reason to develop software in Europe at all. One fundamental problem with such comparisons is an assumption that companies pay for working hours. Well, it’s important to get the value for money,... Continue Reading →
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