Reviewing The Siemens Information And Communications Network Information Technology Essay

Reviewing The Siemens culture And Communications Net clip Information Technology Es labelSiemens Information and Communications Ne devilrk be composed of several regional development centers around the world. One of those, fit(p) in Bangalore, India, was tending(p) the tasks of developing two enormous scale Softw atomic number 18s during the 1990s. The number one of those, called ADMOSS (Advanced Multifunctional Operator Service System) was physiological bodyed to facilitate modern call centers with most 500 features. The second one which followed after five years was called NetManager, it had a substance abuser-friendly, and graphics based user interface and roughly 6,000 features regarding establishment and nourishment of EWSD network-nodes and networks. both(prenominal) of these schemes suffered huge deadlines-slippages, faulty design (at least initially), undetected-till-last- full point errors, embarrassment with customers and miscommunications surrounded by ICNs M unich headquarter and its Bangalores development center1. The following is an travail to break down the issues, their causes and possible avoidances for any(prenominal) correspondent projects.By the late 1980s Munich has recognized the talented human option visible(prenominal) in India. It was huge, both in terms of head-counts and whopledge. It was cheap, initially visible(prenominal) at just 20% cost of a similar German softw be developer, which later in ex increased to 25%. It similarly had unmatched performance, in personal computing devices programming, in which ICN has deficiency in available human resource. Most ICN developers had worked on large systems and had little to no pay back of personal computers programming. In contrast, Indian programmers have grown up experimenting with antecedent version of desktops and laptops and by 1990s have r from each oneed level of ingeniousise in more or less areas. Capitalizing on this resource, ICN decided to have the two projects done in India, in spite of huge cultural incompatibilities, language problems, physical space and visa issues.The first project given to Bangalore was in no elan any minor thing. It was do for existing and large customers of Siemens that heavily account on it. It might be a non-optimal decision make by Munich but being risky it besides promises huge benefits at end.ADMOSS had to facilitate tele selling interface with non-Siemens equipment and handle large conference calls for example, among its other(a) tasks. No surprise that at peak, 150 software developers were working on ADMOSS in Bangalore alone, in addition of local and German managers, proveers and other load-bearing(a) staff.The project was managed centrally by Munich, sending specifications for each of the subsystem to a lavishly managerial level in Bangalore. This decision of central management was made maybe cod(p) to initial distrust by Germans on Indians as it was their first encounter with them. I n India, each subsystem was managed by a German or Indian manager who works with little co-ordination with each other. at a time a subsystem is developed and established locally is sent to Munich where it is integrated with the abatement of the system. This method, though gave high power to Munich and enforced strict quality go steady has a design flaw, a programmer might be expert and happen upon flaw in the subsystem he has worked on, but smokenot easily identify any integration errors. This method would have worked if Munich had a good size of its own programmers who tackle all the integration errors.The matters became more complicated callable to the fact that the requirements of the software were not totally finalized at the start. While programmers are accustomed to tally-time wishes made by clients given after the development has started and discover their best to accommodate that, in large systems such as ADMOSS which also requires very large scale of precision (9 9.999% or five nines) its very hard to accommodate that once a system is already in development. While the project was being developed, a ray of emails and faxes kept approach shot with change requests resulting in inevitable design flaws and raisevas failures. Later on, the developers had to work longsighted hours to wrinkle come forward those design flaws to ultimately produce exceedingly reliable software. If we try to go back who is responsible for that, the blame comes on the marketing team in Munich that may have over-promised and was definitely not documenting and discussing every(prenominal) requirement with client. Some blame also goes to the client, who being a large corporation itself and had used software since a long time should know that run-time modifications often corrupt the project and requires heroic efforts by programmers to save the day.On one occasion, work on a billing application was halt midstream after half a years work because of customers changin g needs. Although this face of work interruption involved plainly 15-20 personnel at Bangalore each year, a programmer admitted to feeling de-motivated wondering about the intensity of miscommunication in the midst of Bangalore and Munich. This sometimes leads to the problem discussed later, high employee turnover, where programmers attempt to shift to those jobs where requirements are perceived as stable.Finally, there was problem of lack of sufficient attention given by high managers in Munich. In the words of a of age(p) project manager, not all specifications were finished by our Munich office since we ourselves were not given enough timeFinally, when all two million lines of ADMOSS codification was compiled together to create an integrated system, many problems surfaced. Major of them are subsystems were install to be more interdependent on each other than desired, and, test criteria and tools were different in Bangalore and Munich. The first of these appears to be a short coming on billet of developers in Munich who were responsible for integration of the subsystems and in a importantly smaller way on the subsystems developers in India. The second one, is definitely a management lapse made by Munich headquarter, the same test beds as used in Munich must be provided to Bangalore at the initial stage to ensure local error-testing and removal. That would have saved a lots of monetarily and secular costs that the company had to finally bare.ADMOSS was finally liberated to the German customer at the end of 1996. As Hans Hauer, VP of Software RD put it, This was with some embarrassment because as Germans we expect language on time and with quality. The system turned out not to be fully stabilized and kept crashing. There were some minor problems too, like the user-interface being unprofessional, as the client commented, flashy and distracting, resembling television receiver game interfaces, too technical style of documentation etc. When we go bad the causes of these problems a few things come up first, the part of embarrassment due to delay is a fault of Indians but not much because at least six months efforts were lost not by any fault of programmers but by a huge blunder made by client and sales team (discussed above). Second, the part of embarrassment due to delivery of a low quality return is fault of Munich who delivered a product not fully tested. Third, the inappropriate design of user interface is perhaps due to non-sufficient communication about its requirements made by managers to the programmers. In absence of any stated and restricted user interface requirements, the programmers made the user interface as they liked it which of argument not satisfied the customer. Fourth, Indians attempt to make documentation too technical for customer is perhaps due to language problem and cultural mismatches, which cant be blamed to any party.In spite of all of these issues, with time, the Indo-German team corrected the system faults and delivered a stable, working system to Munich. ADMOSS ended up highly popular with customers. The Bangalore billet remained active with after-sales service, eventually correcting over 90% of ongoing faults.The second project given to Bangalore was called NetManager. It would be a user-friendly and graphics-based software product that would cover telecom customers a complete range of facilities for performing all operating, administration and maintenance functions on EWSD nodes and networks (e.g. integration of new telephone subscribers, billing, enable avocation studies to understand customer needs, and provide system surveillance etc among its 6,000 functions).Work at Bangalore commenced in early 1996 with an initial force of 30 programmers. The june 1998 pilot release involved some 300,000 lines of code and proved a hit at the customer test sites. Munich learned from the past project and gave Bangalore the same test-bed it was victimisation so that developer can tes t the system as they develop it.By November 1999, Bangalore sent its complete NetManager Version 2 to Munich for testing. Typically Munich tested stability (or reliability) of new software installed by launching it on Friday afternoon and hoping to find no errors in the test log on Monday. NetManager Version 2, even so, ran only one hour before crashing to a halt. A check of the test logs ultimately revealed a staggering 700 faults hidden at various points on some 600,000 lines of computer programming code, with 100 categorized as heartbreaking Level 1 faults. Initial trouble-shooting indicated that each fault could not scarcely be corrected individually, since each correction could create ripple effectuate across the inviolate system.A late November 1999 workshop in Bangalore involving managers from Munich and India bring in down the root cause of quality problems. As it turned out, the Indian group assumed, as in the case of most desktop figure applications, that the syst em would be shut off at night, and that it was pleasant for a desktop-based computer system to crash once a week. This assumption was gain reinforced by an grounds that operation of the EWSD switch itself would not depend on NetManager. Furthermore, the Indian team underestimated system usage by an spotless order of magnitude. We were ignorant admitted an Indian programmer, we didnt think of asking what loads to test with, but Munich were also at fault for not telling usSome of these erroneous assumptions could ultimately be traced to different work schedules. In the essential summer months, many Germans went ahead with their several weeks-long pre-booked family vacations, often without going contact information, stranding the Indians. During crisis periods, Indian programmers, in contrast, typically took only personal leaves of two or three days, and worked 70-80 hours per week or even more. Balanced against this, however the ongoing high attrition rate was in Bangalore.As we analyze the issues and their causes, it is found that although the requirements were stable this time, which was a huge accomplishment on part of marketing team and upper management, it was not fully communicated to developers. This can be traced to faults of middle and lower management. As was in the user interface design of ADMOSS, since requirements were not explicitly stated the programmers made their own assumptions which (like in earlier project) didnt match the requirements of the company or the customer.Another cause was often unavailability of appropriate personnel at Munich for communication because at the most crucial summer season of development they are out on long vacations. They do so often without any means of communication left. In that case, a developer would either have to wait for the person to return (which was of course unacceptable) or make his or her own assumptions to continue with the development. The solution is either to reschedule the vacations time p eriod to some less crucial months (lets say spring) or the person keep in contact with ICN through a phone. In case of a vacation trip to very impertinent location where telephone is unavailable, the person should call to company as in brief as he reaches a near city or settlement with a telephone line. This lack of professionalism on part of Germans resulted in Indians taking no annual vacations, working double hours a week than they are paid for and taking the pain of late modifications in design and code.On part of Indians, the high turnover was a very big issue. formerly a developer hop to a better paying job, almost entire computer code written by him or her immediately becomes unusable for sometime until some other programmer decrypt it and in some cases even rewrite it. This may have resulted in delays and design flaws when soul try to modify an already made design in his or her own way not thought by the original occasion no longer in company.In January 2000, the Net Manager was finally demonstrated to the client. gobs of errors came up. They were traced down to two root causes. First, the German testers presenting the software to the client were not well-prepared. Second, the test-bed provided to Bangalore by Munich in 1996 had gone outdated by now and was not the same test-bed Munich now uses or was used in the demonstration to client. Both of these causes can be easily traced to the faults on part of Germans. The testers had no acceptable reason for unpreparedness. The high management responsible for updating Bangalore with test-bed was ignorant towards this duty.We can conclude that, having worked together for well over half a decade the cultural differences amid the two countries were handled well. With time Indians understood what is expected from them and Germans spend substantial time and money training its people to decode Indian communications. A German spent 3 years in Bangalore suitable expert in South Indian English accent and u nderstanding of local culture and hidden meanings of phrases etc. But there is a limit to what humans can accomplish, the physical distance between Munich and Bangalore remained a reality, advent of faxes, telephone calls, emails and even video calls can never supercede face-to-face communication. Two developers working together on the same computer (as in Extreme Programming2) cannot be substituted with two developers chatting on an Instant courier (such as hotmail or yahoo) even if through Remote Desktop share they can actually view each others computer screen and run actions on it. It is also learned that human conflicts in most cases can only be solved with real, face-to-face communication. In absence of hyper-fast physical transportation (such as one that reduce travel time between the two cities to less than one hour) and no visa restrictions the problems faced by ICN in development of ADMOSS and NetManager are very likely to raise its unlovely head time and again.