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Project Management Consulting |
copyright 2007-20010, Project Management Consulting
PROCESS DEVELOPMENT, IMPROVEMENT, and DOCUMENTATION
Process Improvement Management
Project management should include measurement, assessment, and improvement of the organization's project processes. This is often managed by a Program Management Office (PMO).
Regardless of the formalisms employed by an organization, there is room for measurement and for process improvement. Even if your development organization is a small and free-spirited one, you can improve reliability, predictability, and the bottom line through basic processes.
There are few developers who have not learned the hard way the value of source code control. It's essential to be able to back out a change. No one wants to find out the changes just made were overwritten by someone else making different changes to the same file.
Many development shops have learned the hard way that it is critical to be able to repeat release builds. How can you support a release that you cannot build again in your own shop?
How can you tell if your application is ready to release? By what means do you determine that it has been adequately tested?
What kind of software are you releasing? How much tolerance does the application have for errors.
Project Management and Process Improvement
These are but a few process related topics that project managers must address. The top notch project manager seeks out those areas in the development environment that can most benefit from simple process adjustments, or the addition of processes through data collection and measurement. Few development shops can tolerate cultural upheaval introduced by wholesale process change. An incremental approach is often preferable.
Measurement of organizational performance is a key to understanding what is working, and what isn't. Institution of metrics, targeted at the organization and not the individuals comprising the organization go a long way to helping determine where process improvements will help.
The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute - Capabilities Maturity Model Integration (SEI CMMI) and ISO 9001are two formal processes used by some development organizations. The SEI CMMI, in very simple terms, defines five levels at which software development organizations may be classified. The levels indicate the maturity of the organization in terms of defined development processes, and the adherence to those processes. ISO 9001 is defined by the International Standards Organization and sets forth requirements for the documentation of quality processes within an organization.
Project Managers should strive to understand, follow, and improve upon (or introduce where appropriate) processes that improve the reliability and predictability of software projects. This is in part accomplished by defining metrics and measuring against those metrics.
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