| In recent times, both academia and practitioners have increasingly focused on the importance of offshore outsourcing. Analysts estimate that the offshore component of IT services is expected to rise to ;The first perspective is effectiveness--where the focus is on managing the internal processes to have a positive impact on customers. This is important, because a satisfied customer is key to a successful and profitable organization. Accordingly, in Chapter 2 of this dissertation, we study the determinants of project performance and customer satisfaction in outsourced offshore software projects. The second perspective is the internal efficiency--where focus is on increasing the efficiency of processes and people; thus, leading to increase in productivity. Clearly these two perspectives are intertwined. An understanding of factors affecting productivity of individuals will enable the managers to set appropriate goals for team members, improve delivery performance, and ultimately increase customer satisfaction. Chapters 3 and 4 of this dissertation investigate productivity improvement using software maintenance as a context. In Chapter 3, we investigate the role of both individual-level factors, such as overall experience, task variety, and newness of task handled, and team-level factors such as team size, new team member entry, and team member exit, on individual productivity. Next, in Chapter 4, we investigate how productivity can be improved by better allocation of individual's effort to tasks that have the following property: the longer it takes to resolve the task, the less is the likelihood that the task will be completed successfully. |
