[Case Study] IONA 2

1 - Essence: IONA was said to be looking for a business model, but it had its "eyes on prize" (http://managingdesignanddevelopment.blogspot.ie, 2015), it never focused on planned strategy or business model but focused on the goals alone.

- It was an Irish company in the true sense with no formality among the team members when it came to celebration or fixing a problem. IONA was a launch pad of home-grown tech entrepreneurs.

- IONA's success can be attributed to its product Orbix as well as equally to the way the company was organised and dealt with its customers.

- Income from services provided in terms of training in C++ and Object Oriented Programming was invested back into company for product development. - IONA had a business model which seemed to have shaped the markets

- The support organisation was also along the lines of the product line, hence the customer support engineers could also had technical product knowledge

- Orbix as a 'cash cow' - mature products that need maintenance alone

2 - Learning to be done from my side – HPUS, MVS, QNX, PS, PD, kent beck, extreme programming, ART, Rational Unified Process, Capability Maturity Model.

3 - Problems to be addressed:

- customer support for current products

- Moved office alot

- Slowly community sense was lost.

- Cost of supporting the legacy customer base begin to eat into company's profits.

- Lack of strategy initially began to backfire in later years when the company numbers grew. Became hard to manage the number of people. they were in dire need of a new strategy to manage the numbers.

- "junior management team" - all of pain, not power?

- loss of work-life balance, engineers begin to stretch and work overtime

- engineers were unsatisifed working on legacy product, they wanted to work on the product of next generation ART

Reference: http://managingdesignanddevelopment.blogspot.ie