Objective:
Discuss how the culture in an organization can affect important non-functional requirements (system qualities) such as:
- Performance (Ytelse)
- Maintainability (Driftbarhet)
- Reliability (Driftssikkerhet)
- Availability (Tilgjengelighet)
Scenario:
Imagine you are implementing a new software system inside a large organization with a complex value chain. Different departments are responsible for different parts of the system.
Instructions:
- Form into small groups.
- Assume the organization has a pathological or bureaucratic culture.
- Discuss:
- What problems could arise related to performance, maintainability, reliability, and availability because of the culture?
- Then, discuss:
- What challenges could happen if different departments have different cultures? (e.g., some are pathological, some are bureaucratic, some are generative)
Background:
You have already learned about Westrum's classification of organizational cultures:
- Pathological (power-oriented, information hoarding)
- Bureaucratic (rule-oriented, information protection)
- Generative (performance-oriented, information flow encouraged)
Quick Example
- Reliability Problem (Pathological Organization): Critical failure reports are hidden to avoid blame, causing repeated outages.
- Maintainability Problem (Different Cultures): One team follows strict documentation processes (bureaucratic), while another team improvises and delivers faster (generative), leading to misunderstandings during system updates.
Tips for Your Discussion:
- How would a pathological culture impact system handovers, bug fixing, downtime handling, or system updates?
- What happens to reliability when different teams don't trust each other or don't share information easily?
- How might a generative department clash with a bureaucratic one when trying to improve system maintainability?
- Think about everyday scenarios: communication delays, blame games, refusal to collaborate, or silos.
Deliverable:
Prepare a short summary with:
- Key problems you identified for each system attribute
- An example of how cultural differences between departments could make things worse
You will present your main findings briefly to the class.