Working Papers

Variation in Experience and Team Familiarity: Evidence from Indian Software Services

Published:July 30, 2009
Paper Released:June 2009 (revised August 2009)
Authors:Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats

Executive Summary:

In the context of team performance, common wisdom suggests that performance is maximized when individuals complete the same work with the same people. Although repetition is valuable, at least up to a point, in many settings such as consulting, product development, and software services organizations consist largely of fluid teams executing projects for different customers. In fluid teams, members bring their varied experience sets together and attempt to generate innovative output before the team is disassembled and its individual members move on to new projects. Using the empirical setting of Wipro Technologies, a leading firm in the Indian software services industry, this study examines the potential positive and negative consequences of variation in team member experience as well as how fluid teams may capture the benefits of variation while mitigating the coordination costs it creates. Key concepts include:

  • As organizations continue to depend on the output of teams, and teams, in turn, rely on members with varied prior experience, it becomes critical for teams to manage these differences and dependencies successfully.
  • If the most valuable assets of many companies are their employees, then organizations need to shift from only thinking about their project portfolio to also considering their employee-experience portfolio.
  • Managing employee-experience portfolios will require managers to consider the breadth of types of experience (e.g., customer, technology, etc.) captured across the members of a team as well as their familiarity with each other. Doing so may offer managers an important new lever for improving organizational performance.

About Faculty in this Article:

HBS Faculty Member Robert S. Huckman

Robert Huckman is the MBA Class of 1958 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Abstract

In settings ranging from product development to service delivery, fluid teams of individuals with different sets of experience are tasked with projects that are critical to their organization's success. Although building teams from individuals with different prior experience is increasingly necessary, prior work examining the relationship between experience and performance fails to find a consistent effect of variation in experience on performance. The problem is that variation in experience improves a team's information processing capacity and knowledge base, but also creates coordination challenges. We hypothesize that team familiarity - team members' prior experience working with one another - is one mechanism that helps teams leverage the potential benefits of variation in team member experience by alleviating coordination problems that such variation may create. We use several years of detailed project- and individual-level data from an Indian software services firm, Wipro Technologies, to examine the effects of team familiarity and variation in experience on multiple measures of performance for software development projects. In most cases, we do not find evidence of a significant main effect for variation in experience on performance. However, when we examine the interaction of team familiarity and variation in experience, we see a complementary effect on measures of delivery performance (i.e., a project being delivered on time and on budget). In team familiarity, our paper identifies one mechanism for capturing the performance benefits of variation in experience and provides insight into how the broader management of experience accumulation affects team performance. Keywords: Experience, Knowledge, Software, Team Familiarity, Variation. 37 pages.

Paper Information