Home

Contact Us

Services

Improvement Program

Assessments

Consulting is free

Free tools

Marc De Smet

Management Information Systems bvba

A precondition for a successful improvement program is management awareness about (potential) problems with development and an understanding of the avenues for solution. Management may become more aware if they understand the answers to questions like:

· How does the size of our developed products evolve over time (e.g. the software contents of our products double every 18 months)?

Improvement Program

· How does the productivity of our developers evolve over time (e.g. the productivity increases by 8 % per year)?

· What is the quality of our products and is this quality increasing?

· How many of our development projects finish on time and within budget?

· …

 

Alternatively, the score of an Interim Maturity Evaluation (see Free Tools) may also make management to understand that they have serious problems controlling their projects.

 

When management is sufficiently aware of (potential) problems they will want to improve the situation. It is a management responsibility to start up the improvement program by:

· Setting the objectives for the program.

Objectives should preferably be defined in measurable terms such that it can be verified objectively if the goals are achieved or not. Typical examples of objectives are:

· increase predictability, i.e. decrease lead time slippage and/or budget overrun

· reduce lead time

· increase quality

· increase productivity

· Defining the approach for the program

The picture on this page shows an high-level overview of an improvement program. Management has to decide who is responsible, who has authority and who will actually carry out these activities.

 

When management has defined the objectives and the approach, the improvement loop can start. This loop typically consists of the following main activities:

· Asses the current situation.

It is difficult, if not impossible to achieve goals if one does not know the starting point. Using one of the possible assessment methods the department will fully understand:

· Its current way of working.

· The strong and weak points of the current way of working.

· The business risks involved with the weak points in the current way of working (e.g. problems in project management will lead to reduced predictability, problems with quality assurance will lead to quality problems in the products, …).

· The necessary areas in the current way of working that need to be improved.

· Define the improvement plan.

Based on the identification of the areas that need improvement an improvement plan is developed. Such a plan is a project management plan for the improvement project. It identifies the deliverables of the improvement project, along with the activities that need to be carried out to produce those deliverables, the allocation of resources to these activities and a schedule of these activities.

· Agree and commit to the improvement plan.

It is only when the plan is finalized that the repercussions of the improvement project are clear. Its cost, its demand on the in-house and consulting resources, its timetable are clearly defined. It is imperative that management fully endorses the execution of this plan, accepting the short term investments that are needed to reach the long term benefits.

· Execute the planned activities.

Once the plan has been committed its execution can start. Typically this will involve engineers to work in small working groups on specific improvement areas. If the know-how to implement some of the recommendations is not sufficiently present, external consultants may be involved in these working groups, or may train people such that their knowledge and skill in those matters is increased. External consulting can speed up this process considerably.

· Track the improvement plan and evaluate the improvements.

During the execution of the improvement project the project leader of the project should regularly check:

· Are we on track with the improvement plan, and if not, define and implement corrective action

· Judge if the improvements are reached by executing the plan. If not, additional or different improvement activities may have to planned and carried out.

 

Senior management should do periodic follow-up of the implementation of the recommendations and the execution of the improvement program. Consultants may also offer help in these follow-ups.

 

Here you will find a .pdf document with more information on this subject.