Prioritization of proposals

Next, the proposals are organized in three urgency level groups of approximately same size based on their frequency in the interviews. In this study, the high frequency of the proposal in the set of interviews is interpreted as high urgency. There are definitely many more factors that could be considered in determining the urgency of each proposal but assessing them is out of the scope of this study. Therefore, only frequency in the inter-views is considered here.

As there were only a few proposals that were mentioned three to six times, these pro-posals form the highest urgency group. These are the propro-posals that the company should consider first in order. They include changes that many employees consider essential and the current situation of which interferes with the work of many. The proposals of the highest urgency group, their frequencies and the process categories which they are re-lated to are presented in Table 8. To save space, the categories are referred to as PR (product realization), SWD (software development), SWM (software maintenance), SWRM (software risk management) and G (general).

Table 8 The highest urgency group of proposals, their frequencies in different inter-views and the process categories which they are related to.

Proposal Frequency Process

Checklists should be used to ensure both software devel-opment and regulatory requirements are fulfilled

6 SWD

All software requirements and related plans should be listed clearly on Jira and required documentation. Jira should be taken into use in all projects. Linking Jira and Git should be taken into use in user interface development as well

4 SWD

Customer calculation monitoring should be automated and the data centralized in one system

4 SWM

Customer data should be centralized in one system 3 PR Testing should be improved: usability and user interface

testing increased, more integration testing

3 SWD

Regular code or design reviews should be taken into use to bring structure and keep everyone up to date

3 SWD

The second highest urgency group is formed by proposals that were mentioned twice. In general, these proposals should also be looked at by the management in the future, but they are not as urgent as the higher frequency proposals or their impact is less extensive.

Some of these proposals also directly concern the work of only a few of the interviewees, which is why they did not come up in as many interviews as the higher urgency pro-posals. The second highest urgency group proposals, their frequencies and the process categories that they are related to are presented in Table 9.

Table 9 The second highest urgency group of proposals, their frequencies in differ-ent interviews and the process categories which they are related to.

Proposal Frequency Process

Different components needed for customer-related pro-cesses such as installations should be collected in one place

2 PR

Customer communication should be accelerated 2 PR Development projects should be more consistent and

con-sider more developer input regarding time and resource management

2 SWD

Customer feedback should be collected more proactively and fed efficiently to the software development process

2 SWM

Risk management should be considered more from also other perspectives, currently focuses the most on internal risks

2 SWRM

Regulatory documentation and related requirements should be more present in the development work

2 G

The document management procedures should be made quicker and more efficient

2 G

Almost all processes should be optimized for the current situation and number of employees

2 G

Lastly, the lowest urgency group consists of the proposals that only came up once in the interviews. They either are high-level ideas or focus on quite small details. Many of them would definitely be good to pay attention to in the future, would make the work of many easier and result in small improvements from the customers’ perspective, but in principle they do not require attention acutely. The lowest urgency group proposals, their frequen-cies and the process categories that they are related to are presented in Table 10.

Table 10 The lowest urgency group of proposals, their frequencies in different inter-views and the process categories which they are related to.

Proposal Frequency Process

An outlet for information about available human resources should be established

1 PR

The management approval procedure should be estab-lished and the items requiring approval listed

1 PR

All employees should be aware of central customer-related processes

1 PR

Customer communication directly on the software (instead of email) should be increased

1 SWM

Security risk control measures should be made more prac-tical for the customers

1 SWRM

Testing of risk controls should be increased and diversified 1 SWRM The process updates and optimization should be done in

the context of an existing product project to ensure that the updates are valid

1 G

Process tables with all process steps and required docu-mentation should be created to make them easily under-standable and reviewable by employees

1 G

As this prioritization only refers to the frequency of the proposals in the interviews and not to other factors affecting their urgency, it should not be utilized as such in the case company. Instead, it can be used as a starting point for the evaluation of the relevancy and urgency of the proposals and creating a final prioritization that can then be imple-mented in practice. The prioritization should be re-evaluated and adjusted by a person with comprehensive knowledge on different aspects affecting the urgency of the pro-posals.