This article reports results of a qualitative study that examined communication challenges decision makers experience during the response stage of crisis management. Response is perhaps the most critical of the three stages (prevention, response, recovery) identified in crisis research literature. Response is the point when crisis managers make decisions that may save lives and mitigate the effects of the crisis. Actions at this point also significantly influence public opinion about the crisis and an organization's handling of the event. This study provides additional insight into the complexities of the response stage through analysis of 26 interviews conducted with crisis decision makers involved in 15 organizational crises. Ten additional crises were analyzed through secondary data sources. The result of these analyses is the identification and explication of four crisis response steps: observation, interpretation, choice, and dissemination.
In most software development organizations, there is seldom a one-to-one mapping between software developers and development tasks. It is frequently necessary to concurrently assign individuals to multiple tasks, and to assign more than one individual to work cooperatively on a single task. A principal goal in making such assignments should be to minimize the effort required to complete each task. But what impact does the manner in which developers are assigned to tasks have on the effort requirements? This paper identifies four task assignment factors: team size, concurrency, intensity and fragmentation. These four factors are shown to improve the predictive ability of the well-known Intermediate COCOMO cost estimation model. A parsimonious effort estimation model is also derived that utilizes a subset of the task assignment factors and Unadjusted Function Points. For the data examined, this parsimonious model is shown to have goodness of fit and quality of estimation superior to that of the COCOMO model, while utilizing fewer cost factors.
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