Process Your Life

Experiences from one of our Software Process Improvement (SPI) workshops

Recently I’ve been to one of our new Automotive customers to a SPI kick-off workshop. The workshop was lead by one of Method Park’s expert SPI consultants. One of the goals was to find out the current situation and especially the issues of the company which should be solved. The attendees of the workshop came from several departments like software development, system development, quality management, IT or production.At the end of the session we had collected a lot of things where the attendees thought they have problems at the moment. These things were clustered and one of the big clusters contained the following issues:

•  Process interfaces are not transparent
• Processes are poorly visualized
• It is not clear which process has to be followed by whom in which project
• Procedures are hard to read and understand
• When it comes to templates nobody really knows where to find the current version
• It is not transparent where documents are stored

My first thought was: this is exactly where we want to support with Stages!

We are now starting to define their processes with Stages and can hopefully seamlessly solve one of their big issues.

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Just a few weeks ago the 20th North American SEPG (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/sepg/2008/) took place. Of course method park was also there with a booth in order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of this well known conference.

For us the main focus was project kit (now Stages), our process management solution. Quality managers, EPG members, project managers and many more visited our booth in order to find out more. As the SEPG is a SEI conference and therefore CMMI based, the conference participants were from different industries like government, defence, insurance, financial services but also automotive. Actually, all of them had many things in common when they were searching for a process management tool. Let me give you a short overview of the main points of interest:

• Regardless of the business the people came from, the most important thing is to find a solution which helps to effectively communicate and implement processes so that they are more widely accepted and used.

• Flexible process definition without boundaries or regulations given by tools was also very important. But on the other hand structured process modelling supported by process release mechanism was essential.

• In order to achieve more process acceptance and to make it easy for the project people to do their daily work, to avoid redundancies and inconsistencies, integration into one’s tool landscape is vital. Configuration/document management, project management and requirements management tools were the most important ones.

• Last but not least people were looking for support in measurement and reporting. No wonder if one has a look at the different metrics everybody is managing, at the diversity of data which has to be collected from various systems and to be represented in different types of charts or tables.

And how about you? Are you ready to institutionalize your processes?

Here are some impressions of the SEPG:

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