Jharna Software: the Move to Agile Methods
Case 1: Jharna Software: The move to Agile methods
January 20, 2009
Background & Problem Identification Jharna Software is a software company located in India that was established in 1992, with a focus on IT services for the banking and finance sector. Its offerings include e-commerce solutions, networking solutions, offshore services, applications development, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management (CRM), e-CRM and business process outsourcing. Jharna received awards from the Indian government for performance in exports and does well in the market. The founders believe that their high-quality offerings at low price points is the key to their success, helped by their focus on maintaining a highly-skilled work force which they built by focusing on employee benefits and training. However, intense pressure from competitors has caused Jharna’s management to feel the need to improve on current practices. The primary problem in their software development process is in systems integration at the customer site. The integration process is hard to plan and consistently takes more time and resources than allocated. There were multiple theories about why, most of which focused on incomplete and changing system specs throughout development that complicated the integration phase. As a result, there was increasing interest in addressing this problem by implementing a new agile development process. The decision on whether or not to change to agile processes must be made quickly in order to allow marketing time to respond.
Decision Options & Selection Criteria Jharna Software has two decision options: 1) change to agile development processes or 2) maintain current processes and explore other alternatives to address the system integration issues. This is not an easy decision, as there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach and differing viewpoints on the correct decision. Before any major decision is made, a set of evaluation
January 20, 2009
Background & Problem Identification Jharna Software is a software company located in India that was established in 1992, with a focus on IT services for the banking and finance sector. Its offerings include e-commerce solutions, networking solutions, offshore services, applications development, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management (CRM), e-CRM and business process outsourcing. Jharna received awards from the Indian government for performance in exports and does well in the market. The founders believe that their high-quality offerings at low price points is the key to their success, helped by their focus on maintaining a highly-skilled work force which they built by focusing on employee benefits and training. However, intense pressure from competitors has caused Jharna’s management to feel the need to improve on current practices. The primary problem in their software development process is in systems integration at the customer site. The integration process is hard to plan and consistently takes more time and resources than allocated. There were multiple theories about why, most of which focused on incomplete and changing system specs throughout development that complicated the integration phase. As a result, there was increasing interest in addressing this problem by implementing a new agile development process. The decision on whether or not to change to agile processes must be made quickly in order to allow marketing time to respond.
Decision Options & Selection Criteria Jharna Software has two decision options: 1) change to agile development processes or 2) maintain current processes and explore other alternatives to address the system integration issues. This is not an easy decision, as there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach and differing viewpoints on the correct decision. Before any major decision is made, a set of evaluation