Software product line market repositioning: The power of functional groups

This is a longitudinal study of change process as it applies to software product line evolution. The objective is to study and describe changes in software product line that occurred after top management team of a supplier of hardware and software for telecommunication equipments decided to change the target market for its software intensive telecommunication products as a result of market decline. This company has a proven record of innovation and technological breakthroughs and has offices in Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia. The study is divided into three phases. The next phase in this study is to look at the relationships between functional groups and to try and answer the question: “Does the power of functional groups closest to the customer increases during sales declines?” The analysis of the data available to us shows that functional groups that were closer to the customers increase their relative size; groups located in remote sites decrease in size faster than the groups with similar skills located at the company´s headquarters; and groups that were more involved in developing products and have specialized skills decreased in relative size. Our final analysis shows that the power of functional groups that interact most frequently with customers increases while the power of functional groups that interacts the least with customers decreases.