Background: Organizational scaling in companies developing large and complex products often negatively impacts product quality, time-to-market, and user satisfaction, because the amount of knowledge to learn for such development is huge. Scaling is more challenging if it implies onboarding large number of employees that significantly lowers the overall level of competence in the product organization, if it occurs remotely, and especially when adding locations with high turnover rates and no local experts. Unplanned scaling may lead to significant performance gaps growing beyond the recovery possibility. Yet, the true implications of scaling and ways to scale are neither systematically evaluated, nor well understood.

Why are these problems unsolved: Even though global software development challenges are well researched, organizational learning with respect to offshore sourcing has been slow and not passed well within and across organizations. This might be also because today’s large-scale projects are so large, complex and unique that there is a limited ability to learn from previous efforts. Besides, little is known about “mega” large-scale environments (hundreds of teams) and onboarding hundreds of engineers in ongoing products, about estimating and controlling scaling impacts, and choosing effective learning strategies.

Focus of the project: ScaleWise is set to perform a holistic study of scaling processes aiming to build a theory and taking into account the team, product and organizational perspectives (socio-technical aspects). Our goal is to understand the trade-offs when scaling locally vs remotely, preventive actions and practices that minimize negative impacts of scaling on performance (cost, productivity and quality) and develop a set of actionable recommendations for scaling and onboarding.