TCQAA Round Table Discussion - November 11th 1999
Topic: Process Improvement Experiences
Moderator: Pat Wegerson
What is necessary to get started with a process improvement initiative?
- Sponsorship senior management support
- A compelling reason to change, either pain or profit (even an internal IT
organization can reduce costs or improve productivity)
- Improve or be out-sourced
- Low quality to customers
- Market driving you to measurably improve
- Good business to differentiate you from competitors
- Need to better manage subcontractors
- Educate people on software process improvement, both management and
technical people
- Use a proven methodology or model as a guide to follow (must be documented)
How do you determine which processes need improvement?
- Focus on the areas where problems are most evident
- Analyze post-mortems from project end or project phases (if longer projects)
- Defect analysis determining which deliverables are completed on schedule
or which deliverables have the highest maintenance
- Employee surveys first get individual, anonymous feedback then discuss
summarized feedback as a group for solution synergy
- Formal assessment of processes
What resources and planning are required to execute process improvement?
- Compensation system should motivate people to improve processes (e.g.,
performance review criteria or bonus incentive based on improvement results)
- Must remove or minimize cultural and systemic barriers to improvement
- All affected levels must be trained on the changed processes (cant just
do it!)
- Need to set specific, measurable goals for improvement
- Need to allocate specific resources to process improvement activities
separate from QA, suggest 1 3% of development organization
What works and what does not work when executing process improvement?
- People must be trained on the new processes
- New processes must be required (people will skip optional processes)
- Use small teams of subject matter experts to draft new processes
- New processes should be pilot tested to work out problems
- Processes must be tailored to the organization and the business needs
- Use and leverage early adopters to institutionalize processes
- Work with organization to change the "hammer" approach rarely
works
- Document the processes so they are repeatable and not dependent on an
individual (i.e. bus or lottery sensitive)
How do you know when you have improved (and then what do you do?)
- Must have metrics in place to measure cost, effort, schedule, defects, size
- Organizational stress is lower
- Higher morale
- Fewer problems / crises / fire-fighting
- Less overtime or death march projects
- Retain people in the more sane and productive environment