Senior Manager Requirements
TopCoder
is a software company that relies on the crowdsourcing model to hire designers,
developers, and data scientists from all over the world. As such, the senior
manager of the company requires a unique set of skills to coordinate the
personal, technical, financial, and the commercial requirements of the team,
clients, staff, as well as the projects that are in progress. One of the core
qualities that are necessary for success as the senior manager is excellent
communication skills. The quality will facilitate seamless communication
between all the parties involved, in addition to ensuring that the status
updates are delivered in an efficient manner, both physically and virtually.
Moreover, unlike the traditional approaches where command and control
strategies were the backbone of leadership, an agile senior manager at TopCoder
will need to cultivate a high level of trust, openness, and the ability to
share information with the team members. The manager should also award his team
a greater freedom and liberty to accomplish the code tasks ahead, as this will
set the pace for a highly productive and cooperative work environment.
Therefore, the qualities needed by a senior manager at TopCoder include
effective communication, a high level of openness trust, and information
sharing, as well as the ability to coordinate commercial, financial, technical,
and personal aspects of the project.
Client Concerns at TopCoder
The main
areas of concern for a customer at the company would revolve around the
confidentiality and intellectual property problems that would arise during the
project development phase. Confidentiality involves the release of the product
under development to a competitor, who would, in turn, use it to his advantage.
The fear of the issue stems from the fact that the developers are often unknown
to the client, and, as such, a breach of trust may be hard to trace. Another
fear involves the issue of intellectual property, in which the developer may
file for the copyright of a product that he developed as an open source
project. TopCoder has attempted to solve the above issues by ensuring that the
developers sign an agreement before taking part in the project. Also, ensuring
that a project is handled by various interdisciplinary teams and reviewed
thoroughly for any intellectual property issues will ensure that the product is
quality and free from intellectual property problems and the risk of
confidentiality is minimized. Therefore, TopCoder has taken a significant step
to reduce the issues, though carrying out background checks on the developers
would ensure that the people hired for the sensitive tasks have a good
disciplinary record in their respective regions of residence (Lakhani, David,
and Eric 9).
Information Sharing Example
Crowdsourcing
has assisted in solving a significant number of institutional, business, community
and personal problems, through the concept of information sharing. In addition,
the affordability of the crowdsourcing projects, as well as the timeliness of
the solutions offered, has ensured its efficiency in various sectors and
industries. For example, one of the most beneficial forms of information
sharing applications to society is the Regional Information Sharing Systems
(RISS) used by law enforcement. The RISS program supports law enforcement
efforts nationwide to combat illegal drug trafficking, identity theft, human
trafficking, violent crimes, and promote officers safety. The program operates
the RISS Secure Cloud to facilitate law
enforcement communications and information sharing nationwide. RISS
partners rely on the RISSNET infrastructure to facilitate sharing of millions
of records among all levels of law enforcement. The RISS Program is a
federally funded program administered by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)
Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) (Law Enforcement I.S).
References
Gee, James Paul. The
anti-education era: Creating smarter students through digital learning.
Macmillan, 2013.
Lakhani, Karim, David A.
Garvin, and Eric Lonstein. "Topcoder (a): Developing software through
crowdsourcing." Harvard Business School General Management Unit Case
610-032 (2010).
Law Enforcement Information Sharing | ISE. (n.d.). Retrieved
from https://www.ise.gov/law-enforcement-information-sharing
I do think that it is interesting when the thought of coding or intellectual property between coders and corporations. This issue dates far beyond Top Coder even existed. There will always be the issue that if someone has an idea for a project and writes code and thinks of a brilliant idea to write, when the person creates this working at the company, who has the rights of profit from the code. It may seem simple to think that the company should retain the rights because the employee created it for them, but what if the employee decides to leave the company to start their own business. Is the original creator not allowed to write the same program for their company's use?
ReplyDeleteSo with Top Coder, the prize may be a lot of money and someone will win it with a very good piece of code. But what if that piece of code ends up being worth more than the prize by creating a program that is super profitable for the clients. Who owns the rights to patent this intellectual information? The The client, the coder, or the Top Coder organization itself. This is obviously only going to be dealing with a few extreme cases but is still not unlikely to happen.
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ReplyDeleteI agree that as a senior manager in TopCoder, excellent communication skill is very necessary to develop to succeed at running the firm. The TopCoder community consists of programmers from around the world, they have outstanding technical skill but many of them are not business person. Similarly, the clients’ need is a business solution; manager must understand and figure out how to translate this problem and the goal of the program to the programmers. All of this requires good communication skill and also some of the technical knowledge.
ReplyDeleteAs the TopCoder case mentioned that the company run as “two-sided platform” for software development. The senior managers are standing in between both sides. Therefore, in addition, critical thinking is another skill that a senior manager must have in TopCoder. Mangers have to transform abstract ideas into tangible results and evaluate information from both client and programmers.
All these capabilities is similar from managing a more traditional firm, however, TopCoder’s programmers are not company’s employees, it require different style of communication to work with all programmers. Moreover, managers from traditional firms only make the decision that favors his or her own company while managers in TopCoder must have a clear sense of mind to balance the interest of both parties. It is more difficult for Topcoder’s managers to make judgmental call and they need to be more careful in meetings with both programmers and clients.