Making Process Improvement Work: A Concise Guide for Software Managers and Practitioners - Softcover

Potter, Neil S.; Sakry, Mary E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201775778 ISBN 13: 9780201775778

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2002

Synopsis

Every development organization can benefit by paying attention to process improvement, yet all too many "process improvement initiatives" fail to deliver on their promises. In this concise book, two of the field's leading consultants present easy-to-apply techniques for achieving rapid and quantifiable benefits -- and then maintaining your momentum to deliver even greater value over time. Drawing on their experience with more than 3,000 developers and 100 organizations, Neil S. Potter and Mary E. Sakry show you exactly what works -- and what doesn't work. Next, they present a step-by-step guide to identifying your best opportunities for process improvement, deploying changes effectively, and tracking your progress. The book also includes a detailed example plan document designed to help you jumpstart your process improvement initiative. Making Process Improvement Work includes a foreword by noted software process expert Karl Wiegers. For all developers, project and IT managers, and clients seeking to maximize the effectiveness of the software development process and the value of the software it delivers.

About this title

About the Author

Neil Potter is a co-founder of The Process Group, a company that consults in software engineering process improvement. He has been working in software development, software engineering, and process and project management since 1985. He is an SEI-authorized Lead Assessor.

Mary Sakry is a co-founder of The Process Group, a company that consults in software engineering process improvement. She has been working in software development, software engineering, and process and project management since 1976. She is an SEI-authorized Lead Assessor.

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From the Back Cover

“This book hits the mark for three important issues:

How to keep focused on real improvements

How to develop an implementable improvement plan

How to develop meaningful and useful measurements

I will definitely recommend it to my clients who are just beginning or are having trouble with their improvement program.”
—Norman Hammock, SEI Authorized Lead Assessor

“At last a common sense and business-oriented approach to process improvement. This book gives very practical instruction that is easy to apply. Your people will thank you for it.”
—Nancy K. M. Rees, Vice President and Chief Engineer, Xerox Corporation

“...gets right to the heart of process improvement with specific, concrete steps and excellent examples. It’s a book you can use today.”
—Dennis J. Frailey, Principal Fellow, Raytheon Company

“Too many organizations develop a checklist mentality targeted at achieving the next process maturity level or passing an audit...Neil and Mary remind us to focus on pragmatic mechanisms for achieving superior business results...”
—Karl Wiegers, Principal Consultant, Process Impact

Software process improvement too often reflects a significant disconnect between theory and practice. This book bridges the gap—offering a straightforward, systematic approach to planning, implementing, and monitoring a process improvement program. Project managers will appreciate the book’s concise presentation style and will be able to apply its practical ideas immediately to real-life challenges.

With examples based on the authors’ own extensive experience, this book shows how to define goals that directly address the needs of your organization, use improvement models appropriately, and devise a pragmatic action plan. In addition, it reveals valuable strategies for deploying organizational change, and delineates essential metrics for tracking your progress. Appendices provide examples of an action plan, a risk management plan, and a mini-assessment process.

You will learn how to:

Scope and develop an improvement plan

Identify and prioritize risks and mitigate anticipated difficulties

Derive metrics that accurately measure progress toward business goals

Sell your improvement program in-house

Initially target practitioners and projects most-open to new approaches and techniques

Stay focused on goals and problems

Align the actions of managers and practitioners

Delay major policy documents and edicts until solutions have been practiced and tested

Use existing resources to speed deployment

Incorporate improvement models, such as SEI CMM^® and CMMI^SM, into your improvement program

For those managers who are tired of chronic project difficulties, constant new improvement schemes, and a lack of real progress, this easily digestible volume provides the real-world wisdom you need to realize positive change in your organization.

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Who should read this book?

You are probably more than aware of the problems facing your software development organization. The list of problems usually starts with an overwhelming string of commitments and optimistic deadlines. For example, the marketing department has been promised that the product will be shipped by the end of the year. Customers have been told that everything will be delivered on time, and top management has established year-end bonuses based on meeting these dates. Now the programmers are working progressively longer hours, and the system test group is anxiously awaiting the software in order to begin intensive testing. The technical writers are lost in 300 pull-down menus and cannot get feedback from the programmers. Meanwhile, support engineers are still fixing defects from the previous release and are not optimistic that their lives will improve any time soon.

On top of all this, your group has been signed up to use the new standards and processes developed by corporate engineering. At best, this sounds like just another documentation exercise with little or no positive impact on your group. You have been through numerous improvement programs, each one consuming time, but not providing you with the gains you had hoped for. The benefits you did see were quickly forgotten in subsequent projects.

Sound familiar? If you have lived in an organization like this for a year or two, you are probably a little tired of the chronic problems, new improvement schemes and lack of real progress. If you are ready for a straightforward, systematic approach to improvement, read on.

This book is for managers and practitioners. If you are the director of a division, read the book to understand how your group can systematically improve and tie those improvements directly to your business goals. If you are a project or program manager tasked with developing a specific product, use the information to plan, deploy and track improvements within your team. If you are a process improvement, quality management or development engineer, apply the techniques in each chapter to coach your team through its improvement journey.
How this book is organized

Throughout this book, we will guide you in achieving better organizational results. You will understand the critical steps needed to implement lasting and worthwhile change. The book will stimulate your thinking about:

* How software development organizations improve
* What they improve
* How they deploy and track improvements

The book is based on our work with more than 3,000 software professionals representing some 100 companies around the world. We have included stories and examples from individuals in these companies who are using our ideas as they travel on their road to improvement. We have seen what works and what does not.

The book is small and concise so that you can quickly absorb and use the information. It is organized into three chapters using the concepts of the Shewhart cycle for planning and managing improvement.
Developing a PlanIn Chapter 1, you will develop an improvement action plan based on the business goals and problems of your organization. This approach addresses the frustration that many people experience when improvement programs do not relate to the project work being done. In this chapter you’ll learn about:

* Setting compelling goals for your improvement program.
* Directing all improvement towards achieving business goals and solving the organization’s problems.
* Developing an action plan based on the defined goals and problems.
* Using an improvement model or standard to address the goals and problems.
* Deriving metrics for the goals.
* Identifying potential future problems (risks) with the action plan and mitigating the highest priority risks.
Implementing the Plan

Chapter 2 describes techniques for deploying new practices across the organization. These techniques address the problems of resistance, unwieldy solutions and slow deployment. The central themes in this chapter are:

* Applying selling strategies to deploy new practices.
* Increasing the speed of deployment by working with the willing and the needy first.
* Reducing the risk of failure by building and deployingsolutions in increments.
* Delaying policy document creation and edicts until each solution has been practiced and well tested.
* Using existing resources to increase the speed of deployment.
Checking Progress

Chapter 3 presents techniques for checking the progress of your improvement program and taking corrective actions based on what you learn. Checking progress is an essential activity to provide the organization with feedback when pursuing business goals and solving problems. The resulting data allows for early problem detection, early correction and improved visibility to management on improvement progress. In this chapter you’ll explore methods for:

* Using metrics to track progress based on defined goals.
* Determining corrective actions needed to get the improvementprogram back on track.
* Clarifying lessons learned and actions needed to make future executions of the improvement cycle more effective.
Using improvement models and standards Several improvement models and standards exist that can save you much time, such as the SEI CMM and CMMI, SPICE, BOOTSTRAP and ISO9001 . In each of the chapters, we will reference a model or standard as a framework. These documents incorporate lessons learned from numerous people worldwide who have studied and implemented improvement. If you use them wisely, you can significantly improve your success rate. If you use them academically, you can waste much time. In this book, we will show how to integrate these resources with your improvement program.

The examples in the book include the SEI CMM and CMMI frameworks. If you are using another model or standard, such as SPICE, BOOTSTRAP or ISO9001, substitute it where we refer to the CMM. If you are not using any model or standard, the techniques described in the book will help you develop your own improvement actions to address your organization’s issues.

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Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0201775778
• ISBN 13: 9780201775778
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 169