Social Network Analysis to systematize the technology projects

Situation:

Before I started studying at HULT, I was working for a Multi National Company, which offers management consulting, and technology service to Clients. Success rate is something our company strived and promised to the clients. We were asked to execute projects having different deliverables. But there were many similarities in the projects.

I realized a problem; more often in our organization similar kind of work is being done with mixed results. Situation was we were asked to build a website for real estate company and we took 6 months time which included requirement analysis, development and testing and were able to execute the project with 100 % succession rate with zero defects. After few months a similar kind of project to develop a website for the real estate company was given to other team and they again had to start everything from the scratch and to cover all the basis they required the same amount of time as we did. And even after that they had some defects in the website which we addressed during our website launch. Important things our company should have done to avoid these are

• ·     If they had access to our project then they would be able to avoid the mistakes we committed.(More often than not the project related matter are highly confidential and will not be shared with other teams).
• ·      If the project would have been assigned to us or any other team, which has done similar project.

So my idea is to find the people who have worked and exhibited good skills in executing the project and when a new project starts form the core team with people who have worked in similar project before and choose people who have little or no experience in this kind project. This way the inexperienced people will have guidance from the experienced ones

SNA:

 As Social Network Analysis helps us understand the social relations and their networks. I want to use SNA to find out the following things.

• ·      Execution rates of individuals on different type of projects
• ·      Does the type of project effects his or hers execution rate
• ·      How complex are relationships between them
• ·      Identify people’s specialties or technologies they are good at

Execution Rate:

Every project has metrics, which shows the success of the project. Execution rate takes all the metrics like deadline maintenance, Effectiveness, Resource Maintenance, Deliverables Maintenance etc. into account.

Data Collection:

Gathering data is not a difficult task as every project mangers needs project metrics to report to the leadership. Survey can gives us the data we need. Internal surveys happen in organization and often they are mandatory. Two different surveys can be sent, one to the project manager and other to the employee. Our questionnaire to the employee will have following questions.

• 1.   What are the projects you worked on before ?(Pick from the list)
• 2.   What are the success rates of each project ?
• 3.   According to you who are the people in this project showed commandable expertise?
• 4.   Who are the people Project Manager turn to when there is a crisis in this project ?
• 5.   What is the speciality you are comfortable with?
• 6.   If given a choice what kind of project you will pick?
• 7.   Who in the project or outiside the project you faternize with?

Our questionnaire to the project managers will have following questions. 

1. What are the projects you worked on before ?(Pick from the list)
2.  What are the success rates of each project ?
3. According to you who are the people in this project showed commandable expertise?
4. Who are the people you would turn in case of in this project ?
5. Who would you not pick if you have to do the same project again and why?
6. Who would you pick if you have to do the same project again and why?
7. Who in the project or outiside the project you faternize with?

By using the results we will have two different networks and different attributes and can use SNA to find the influential people. Since we have two networks Employee and project manager. We need to make a single combined network to work with both data so using professor Rusty’s technique to combine both data sets.

Dichotomize both the employee and project mangers data sets with people who have very often-highest success rate and with help of matrix algebra and syntax acasoc create a new dataset which is addition of academic and social data sets and this you will now know the people who employee thinks are best and project manger thinks are best and also their individual responses.

Now with the help of the new combined data set we can identify the most influential people and with help of different attributes we can identify the following

• ·      People who handle stress well
• ·      People who are most reliable
• ·      People who have technical expertise
• ·      People who have good networks

By applying centrality measures I can find people with high degree, high out degree and in degree. So when choosing a person I can customize my requirement. Suppose in the case of project manager I need high degree, high out and in and high closeness as he needs to keep the project afloat and if am choosing a tester I need one who has high in degree than high out degree and closeness doesn’t influence him.

With the help of this data, now if I am asked to form a new project team to build a website for technology company. I would choose the project manager who has high successive rate in handling the project, before making the decision I would also check if he has better relations with other people who might be potential team members and also see what kind of skill set he will offer for the new joiners. And I can do the same for the rest of employees. By this I feel organizations can cut of their project lead time to at least ¾ of the actual time as people will be well aware what is expected of them and also can generate considerable amount of profits.