This study provides a better understanding of how the application of collaborative software development techniques is shaped by and shapes the transactive memory systems of information systems development teams. In particular, we draw from results of critical realist case studies on development teams that apply pair programming and peer code review. The findings improve our understanding of how...

BACKGROUND Maternal and newborn mortality remain unacceptably high in sub-Saharan Africa. Tanzania and Uganda are committed to reduce maternal and newborn mortality, but progress has been limited and many essential interventions are unavailable in primary and referral facilities. Quality management has the potential to overcome low implementation levels by assisting teams of health workers and ...

otal quality management (TQM) is built on the four cornerstones of customer focus, continuous process improvement, management leadership, and employee empowerment. Although empowerment is often the most difficult of the four concepts to implement effectively, organizations that have been successful in empowering their employees invariably see bottomline improvements. Empowerment has been define...

Short abstract Past experimental studies of decision-making in the context of the Newsvendor problem unanimously find that the decision-makers tend to make suboptimal decisions and, unless special measures are taken to induce “in-task” learning, fail to improve quality of their decisions over time. However, most of these past studies dealt with individual decision-makers. In the present study w...

The Standard Platform League is unique among RoboCup soccer leagues for its focus on software. Since all teams compete using the same hardware (a standard robotic platform), success is predicated on software quality, and the shared hardware makes quality judgments simpler and more objective. Growing out a league based on the Sony AIBO quadruped robots, the league has constantly evolved while mo...

Objective: From 2005 to 2007, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture was used as an assessment and intervention tool for hospitals participating in regional improvement collaboratives led by the Delmarva Foundation and Maryland Patient Safety Center. The collaboratives focused on specific hospital microsystems [emergency departments (EDs)...

Efforts to assess and improve the quality of mental health services are often hampered by a lack of information on patient outcomes. Most mental health services in England have been routinely collecting Health of the Nation Outcome Scales (HoNOS) data for some time. In this article we illustrate how clinical teams have used HoNOS data to identify areas where performance could be improved. HoNOS...

Here we present the first empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that a gender-heterogeneous problem-solving team generally produced journal articles perceived to be higher quality by peers than a team comprised of highly-performing individuals of the same gender. Although women were historically underrepresented as principal investigators of working groups, their frequency as PIs at the ...

BACKGROUND Stabilization and resuscitation of a newborn infant is a complex activity that involves multiple team members. Neonatal intensive care units (NICU) participating in the Vermont Oxford Network (VON) iNICQ 2012 quality improvement collaborative reported on delivery room care policies and guidelines and submitted information on up to 10 consecutive deliveries attended by NICU team membe...

OBJECTIVE To test to what extent the four-factor structure of the group innovation inventory (GII) is confirmed for improvement teams participating in a quality improvement collaborative. DESIGN Quasi-experimental design with baseline and end-measurement after intervention. SETTING This study included quality improvement teams participating in the Care for Better improvement programme for h...