Term Paper on "Management at Sun Microsystems"

Term Paper 8 pages (2768 words) Sources: 4 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Management of Sun Microsystems

Sun has become synonymous with intelligent, rapid innovation and the ability to translate complex requirements into financially successful products, which is what Oracle found so valuable in acquiring the company in 2010 (Veverka, 2010). The culture of Sun Microsystems is highly engineering-centric, and as a result, senior management, engineering, product development, sales and service all rely heavily on quantify performance for each process and strategy implemented. The key success factors for Sun Microsystems' products and services divisions have traditionally focused on attracting, retaining and growing key engineering and development professionals as the primary priority. Second, Sun continually pursues greater agility and speed of innovation with extensions to existing products and the development of entirely new ones. Third, Sun's direction in software development continues to be much longer-term than a traditional enterprise software company, as evidenced by the high levels of investment in Java (Veverka, 2010). This difference in perspective on the viability of Java as a source of revenue continues to be a point of contention between Oracle's senior management and the team of executives from Sun Microsystems who joined Oracle after the merger.

The merger between Oracle and Sun Microsystems continues to ironically strengthen the core leadership, organizational culture and values. The leadership within any technology company needs to be hybrid in scope and approach, supporting transformational and transactionally-based approaches to ensure clarity and consistency of communication and measurable results (Van Fleet, Griffin, 2006). The merger has also brought to the forefront how diverse the needs are across the combined companies, with application development, user interface customization, software testing and quality assurance, investments in the time and costs for ongoing support all becoming sources of conflict over time. The two organizations, Oracle and Sun Microsystems, still struggle to orchestrate departments across massive projects, which many executives and senior managers take as a sign of lack of trust throughout the organizations of each other. The most critical element that can unify and strengthen merged companies or create high levels of dysfunction is trust or the lack thereof (Goldman, 2008). As Sun Microsystems is a highly engineering-centric company and Oracle is as well, executive management has taken to using many of the concepts, frameworks, key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that have been discussed throughout our course and presented in the text. Throughout this analysis, those concepts, frameworks, KPIs and metrics will be used to further illustrate the progression Sun's core teams continue to make as part of the larger and more complex management structure of Oracle. As an employee of Sun, it is readily apparently how the pressure to produce consistently measurable results can at times make simple problems become very complex from a technology management standpoint. As a result of this observation, both the functional and dysfunctional control systems are also analyzed as part of this paper. The overall objective of this analysis is to evaluate how the functional and dysfunctional control systems within Sun and Oracle are impacting the long-term effects on company growth. The extensive use of KPIs, metrics, benchmarking and a multitude of quality management techniques and systems are also explained as part of this analysis. As the merged companies compete in the computer and peripherals manufacturing industry, the cost pressures are turbulent, as previous analyses in this course have showed. These market forces accentuate the stress in the company.

Sun Microsystems Development, Engineering and Quality Management

The many processes used for producing enterprise hardware and software systems encompasses design, engineering and coding of both applications and operating systems so the finished system meets the greatest number of potential company's needs. Within Oracle and Sun there are a myriad of applications and systems for managing the software development process, ensuring that deadlines and critical path issues are resolved. It is immediately apparent how skilled a leader is in keeping a complex, operating-system level project moving forward by how their benchmarks and KPIs are reported on the dashboards on company intranet and project management sites.

Of the many development tools and platforms available, the departments I work in at Oracle/Sun have relied on one of the most popular from a software engineering standpoint. The Agile Development Environment and platform is well-suited to managing a project by assigning only the most well-skilled and senior person to each task. It also has a series of metrics and KPIs that can be used for goal setting, continual control over the development process, and real-time reporting as to the status of each action item and task on the critical path. Agile has proven to be invaluable in reporting back resource conflicts between Oracle and Sun Microsystems teams globally, creating a very high level of tension and conflict on tight schedules. The crux or catalyst of the leadership challenges pertaining to Agile begin with the wide variation in how the Indian development teams perceive time and its use for accomplishing goals relative to the U.S. And European teams. The Indian teams like to rush through all their deadlines, in fact "gaming" the Agile system to show tremendous speed and accomplishment. The reason for this is that the Indian programmers are paid on deadlines, not on quality. They push themselves to work seven days a week, twelve to fifteen hours a day at times, to quickly move through their segments of a project. While this has at times led to projects being ahead of schedule, it has just as often led to entire segments of code and in one instance, a block of Java Virtual Machine code (a very larger component of an operating system) having to be completely re-done. Since Oracle has taken over Sun software engineering there continues to be a push to have the Six Sigma DMIAC methodology rigorously enforced across all development centers precisely due to this type of situation occurring. It is as if the Indian perception of time itself on projects is vastly accelerated compared to all other development units, and literally efficiency itself seems to be their customer, who they serve. Re-work often happens on the Indian coding projects that have the highest efficiency ratings, as these development teams take only a rudimentary understanding of customer requirements and continue to work with them. An essential element of any managerial framework is creating and reinforcing a common vision of a project, even if global in scope, with the customers' needs at the center to ensure consistency and common direction (Van Fleet, Griffin, 2006). Our leaders, many of them transactional in their skill sets in that they only have control over immediate rewards and punishments (Camps, Rodriguez, 2011). What is needed is a more transformational leadership style that can combine the intensity to meet or exceed deadlines the Indians have, with the obsession and pride in quality the European and American development teams have. Indian developers are extremely efficient, yet los effectiveness by not stopping to fully collaborate and make sure they completely understands the full scope of customer requirements. As up to 35% of their total salaries are defined by metrics and KPIs measuring deadlines met, clearly the compensation and in some cases, reporting structures of the teams working with and in India needs a drastic change. This shift however will require a leader more transformational, less transactional in scope, capable of getting all development teams onto a common set of performance and bonus incentive programs. The ability of a transformational leader to traverse cultural boundaries and create shared meaning and accountability on key projects is essential for progress to be made on highly integrated, long-term, complex projects over time (Camps, Rodriguez, 2011).

Where this effort needs to begin is in the area of user interface design for the Sun Microsystems operating components running within Oracle software. This is the one area of the enterprise applications where industry analysts, prospective customers, and the industry media all look for clues as to how effective the merger is going. This also sets the foundation for an interesting application of the frameworks discussed throughout the course and presented in the text. As both have pointed out, it is common for one department or division to compete with another. It is up to the leadership of these development teams to keep the competition focused on the overarching goal of delivering an exceptional product or superior user experience (Camps, Rodriguez, 2011). A new user interface has been designed to unify both Oracle and Sun software components, and senior management wants it to be evidence to the outside world (analysts, media, potential customers, existing customers) of how well the companies are working together. Oracle's development teams insist on running the program in Agile, and the Sun team comply., As the weeks of the initial project get underway, the prototype quickly takes shape yet the Oracle team is starting to pull away and rush three, four even five milestones deep without waiting for software quality assurance, user testing, audits of usability or regression testing. All of these factors are critical for the success of this highly visible component.… READ MORE

How to Reference "Management at Sun Microsystems" Term Paper in a Bibliography

Related Term Papers:

E-Business Sun Microsystems Term Paper

Sun Microsystems

Economic and Market Analysis

Globalization

Industry Analysis

Company Analysis

E-Business (Sun Microsystems)

Technology has become king. We must consider just how many people out there today can no… read more

Term Paper 5 pages (1446 words) Sources: 1+ Topic: Business / Corporations / E-commerce

---

Performance Management System Term Paper

Performance Management System within Sun Microsystems Limited Ensure High Organisational Performance?

Whenever we try to understand the possible responses of an organisation to the application of a management system to… read more

Term Paper 12 pages (4451 words) Sources: 1+ Topic: Management / Organizations

---

Managing Information Technology Term Paper

Managing Information Technology - Set of Four Reports

Knowledge Management in Health Care

Managing, organizing and making available to healthcare professionals the many types of content that comprise knowledge management… read more

Term Paper 13 pages (6095 words) Sources: 10 Style: Harvard Topic: Healthcare / Health / Obamacare

---

Comparison of Database Management Systems Research Proposal

Management Systems

Appendix a Project Process Integration Diagram

Appendix B Process Flow Chart

Open Source Security Tools

DBMS Features Analysis

Figure 2 Three Pillars of Security

The database market continues… read more

Research Proposal 12 pages (3329 words) Sources: 3 Topic: Computers / IT / Internet

---

Management Information System in Web Application Research Proposal

Building a Secure Workflow Management System (SWMS)

for e-Government Web Applications

Supervisor:

The Kuwait Ministry of Defense (MOD) needs secure workflow management systems (SWMS) to enable globally distributed users and… read more

Research Proposal 35 pages (11534 words) Sources: 6 Topic: Computers / IT / Internet

---

View 100+ more related papers  >>