Ray Dawson

The cost of email interruption

The use of email by employees at the Danwood Group was studied and it was found that the interrupt effect from emails is more than generally believed. Employees allowed themselves to be interrupted almost as frequently as telephone calls and the common reaction to the arrival of an email is to react almost as quickly as they would respond to telephone calls. This means the interrupt effect is comparable with that of a telephone call. The recovery time from an email interruption was found to be significantly less than the published recovery time for telephone calls. It is to be concluded, therefore, that while Email is still less disruptive than the telephone, the way the majority of users handle their incoming email has been shown to give far more interruption than expected. By analysing the data captured the authors have been able to create recommendations for a set of guidelines for email usage within the workplace that will increase employee efficiency by reducing the prominence of interruptions, restr...

Understanding email interaction increases organizational productivity

To minimize the effect of email interruption on employee productivity, limit the frequency of new-email alerts (silence them, too), make it easier to assess each messages importance, and remove the reply-to-all facility.

Reducing the effect of email interruptions on employees

It is generally assumed that because it is not necessary to react to email messages when they arrive, employees will read their messages in their own time with minimum interruption to their work. This research has shown that email messages do have some disruptive effect by interrupting the user. Employees at the Danwood Group in the UK were monitored to see how they used email. It was found that most employees had their email software check for incoming messages every 5min and responded to the arrival of a message within 6s. A recovery time between finishing reading the email and returning to normal work also existed though it was shorter than published recovery times for a telephone interrupt. This analysis has suggested that a number of methods can be employed to reduce this interrupt effect. Employee training, changing the settings and modes of using the email software and the introduction of a one line email facility are all shown to have beneficial effects. This has led to a series of recommendations that will enable the Danwood Group to make better use of email communication and increase employee effectiveness.

Practical proposals for managing uncertainty and risk in project planning

Abstract Standard planning techniques, such as PERT, and the popular software tools that support them are inadequate for projects involving uncertainty in the project direction and task durations. Probability distributions for task durations and generalized activity networks with probabilistic branching and looping have long been established as viable techniques to manage these project uncertainties. Unfortunately, their complexity has meant that their use in industry is minimal. This paper proposes extensions to existing software tools to specify and manage such uncertainties that would be easy to learn and use. A survey has shown that if these extensions were available, commercial and government organizations would regularly use them.

E-commerce adoption of travel and tourism organisations in South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Uganda

Africa, with its great wealth in wildlife and unique resorts, can benefit from the ever increasing user population of the Internet, particularly in the USA and Western Europe where most of the tourists to Africa come from (Internet World Stats, 2004. World Internet Users and Population Stats. .). A first survey was carried out to find the nature and extent of e-commerce adoption by tourism organisations from South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Uganda which are all popular tourist destinations in eastern and southern Africa. For comparison, a second survey of tourism organisations from USA and Western Europe was also carried out. A total of 373 websites from the four African countries and 180 from the USA and Western Europe were accessed and then evaluated against a list of e-commerce features. The surveys revealed that few of the African organisations are embracing e-commerce and that, although some websites were comparable to those of their western counterparts, the majority had room for considerable improvements. The African websites were found to be generally informative but lacked interactive facilities for online transactions. It is recommended that these African organisations evolve their websites into marketing tools to capitalise on the potential Internet market.

Recommendations for e-commerce systems in the tourism industry of sub-Saharan Africa

The recommendations described in this paper are a continuation of research previously reported in the Telematics and Informatics journal. This paper explains how the tourism organisations from sub-Saharan Africa can evolve their websites into marketing tools and how they can overcome the impediments to e-commerce adoption and usage. The recommendations also explain how the other major players within the economies of these countries can make the environment conducive for e-commerce development and growth so that the tourism organisations from this region can break into the lucrative international tourism market. The recommendations were tested by sending them to the African organisations and experts in e-commerce and tourism who have worked in, or are currently based in Africa, south of the Sahara. The results showed most organisations and experts who responded think that these recommendations will help African tourism organisations adopt and use e-commerce. African tourism organisations that intend to implement or are in the process of implementing e-commerce systems should follow the recommendations outlined in this paper to help sub-Saharan Africa reach its tourism potential.

Introducing software engineers to the real world

Most software engineering graduates begin their careers lacking an appreciation of real-world conditions. Do universities have the resources to simulate this environment or must software companies provide such training themselves?.

Empirical methodologies in software engineering

The collection and use of evidence in software engineering practice and research are essential elements in the development of the discipline. This paper discusses the need for evidence-based software engineering, the nature of evidence in its various forms and some of the research methodologies used in other disciplines for the collection of evidence, which are also relevant to software engineering. Two frameworks or models are proposed which illustrate the relationships between the methodologies discussed. In particular, the paper highlights the importance and roles of both positivist and interpretivist methods of investigation.

Generalised activity-on-the-node networks for managing uncertainty in projects

Abstract Activity networks, for example PERT , have long been used to plan and manage all kinds of projects within both academia and industry. They are, however, limited by their inflexible structure, and so they cannot explicitly identify and control potential risk points and uncertainties within projects. Generalised activity networks provide a more realistic means of controlling projects by identifying, and analysing, scope possibilities within project plans. Project managers are currently more familiar with the activity-on-the-node network planning techniques on which almost all project management software tools are based. In contrast, generalised activity networks have always been restricted to an activity-on-the-arrow representation. Activity-on-the-node representations have several advantages over activity-on-the-arrow representations, including the ability for logical dependency constraints to be applied directly. The paper introduces the first comprehensive generalised activity-on-the-node representation, thus providing a technique that can identify variability in the scope, cost, and duration of a project.

Simple Metrics for Improving Software Process Performance and Capability: A Case Study

This paper presents a case study which describes the application of statistical process performance monitoring and capability assessment on a large process control software project. The process performance and capability monitoring used in the case study is part of a Quality Framework for Software Development (QFSD) devised for the development of control systems at Fisher–Rosemount Systems and provides a practical alternative to ISO9000 quality models. The process performance measurements were based on commonly available metrics that could be obtained with the minimum disruption to the processes being examined. The application of statistical methods were used to establish problem areas at the earliest opportunity allowing process adjustments to be made to improve the process performance. The processes used were defined in terms of work products which were categorized and evaluated for the level of completion. This allowed a process capability to be calculated. Those processes which were found to be at a lower capability level became the focus for the process improvement for the next project. In particular the capability measurement identified processes where questions needed to be raised about the relevance of the process, whether the techniques used were effective and whether the tools were adequate. It was found that achieving high performance and capability is a learning process with the development team improving with each new project. The benefits have been better managed, more cost and time effective projects producing higher quality software. Management and the development team have obtained a better understanding of the software development process and this continuing learning process has lead to a continuous improvement in both the development methodology and the resulting software. The paper presents examples of the real benefits that can be obtained by tracking process performance and assessing process capability at all stages, and shows that this can be achieved without the need to resort to complex procedures for process measurement, as most of the empirical data came from commonly available process data.