Lecture 16: Process Improvement and Process Maturity

Objectives:• Understand what is process improvement?
• Learn how it should be carried out

Process Improvement Process Improvement came to prominence with the notion of business process engineering. It involves rethinking redesigning current process to be more efficient and effective
Proper planning and investment of time and resources is required for process improvement
Planning Process Improvement
Four Questions need to be asked
1. What are the problems in Current Process?
a. There may be identifiable problems like
i. Late Delivery
ii. Poor Quality
iii. Poor Quality
b. You need to know
i. What are the current processes
ii. How much they are followed
2. What are the improvement goals?
a. The above activities would have highlighted a number of problems. This step involves identifying or selecting any of the problems for improvement that were identified in the previous phase
3. How can we introduce process improvement?
a. Identify processes that cause most problems
b. What changes can be made to them?
c. Remember that sudden changes must always be avoided
4. How should improvement be controlled and managed?
a. Procedures to collect feedback must be determined so that it can be judged whether the improvement is beneficial or not?
b. Actions should be taken in response to feedback.
Process Maturity: It is the extent to which the processes are defined and controlled.
SEI’s Capability maturity model (C.M.M) is a framework for assessing software process maturity in development organization
C.M.M defines a framework consisting of three levels
Level 1 (Initial): Organizations have undisciplined processes and it is left to individuals to decide how to do things
Level 2 (Repeatable): Have basic cost and schedule management procedures
Level 3(Defined): Project management activities and engineering activities standardized
Level 4(Managed): Detailed measurement related to process and product are collected and used to control processes
Level 5(Optimized): Have continuous process improvement strategy based on strategic measurement in place