Clients & Case Studies
Case Study 1
Global Financial Services Software Developer Saves $2 Million in Six Months With CMM® Implementation.
Sanchez Computer Associates, a leading financial services software developer reported savings of $2 million in its first six months after achieving Level 3 of the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model® (CMM®). The majority of the savings came from finding and removing defects much earlier in the development cycle, thereby eliminating the considerable analysis, redesign and testing expenses usually incurred when defects are discovered late.
“Beyond the cost savings, we have the sense that the quality of the code we are producing is outstanding,” said Rob Hoerr, vice president, Quality Assurance, for Sanchez Computer Associates. “In just six months, our CMM implementation has helped us achieve quality and productivity improvements that have more than paid for our investment. We are especially pleased with the fact that we were able to achieve the step-up from CMM Level 1 to Level 3 in just 15 months. A key role in our success was played by David Consulting Group, which helped us both develop the streamlined procedures that fit our business and roll them out within a critical mass of key projects.”
Sanchez Computer Associates, Inc., a division of Fidelity Information Services, is a global leader in developing and marketing scalable and integrated software and services that provide banking, securities, customer integration, wealth management and outsourcing solutions to nearly 400 financial institutions in 21 countries. Sanchez helps financial services companies reduce risk, lower operations and technology costs and improve customer management with modern, real-time solutions for replacing or updating legacy mainframe technologies and batch processing systems or introducing new lines of business.
Institutionalizing Excellence
Sanchez’s success has been largely based on the vision of founders Michael Sanchez and Frank Sanchez—replacing financial systems that aggregated information based on accounts with processing systems that focus on the customer. With the company’s software solutions, banks and other financial institutions have the means to gather and process disparate customer data so it can be made available in any transaction. This unique concept, and an ongoing development of evolutionary solutions that exceed customer expectations, has helped Sanchez increase annual revenues nearly fivefold over the past five years to $88.8 million. But management recognized that its success had occurred largely because of the efforts of dedicated teams rather than the proven methods of a mature software development program. Looking to provide a firm foundation for long-term productivity and quality gains, they sought to institutionalize excellence within the organization rather than depend on the availability of a few key individuals.
Hoerr said that the company made the decision to implement a formal, recognized quality system and considered CMM along with ISO 9001, Six Sigma and the Baldridge National Quality Program. “We selected the CMM because of its industry credibility and strong track record for improving quality for a variety of development firms.” The CMM for Software describes the principles and practices underlying software process maturity and is intended to help software organizations improve the maturity of their own software development program in terms of an evolutionary path from ad hoc, chaotic processes to mature, disciplined software processes. The model defines a mature software organization as one that possesses an organization-wide ability for managing software development and maintenance processes.
Need For An Experienced Partner
Sanchez management set a goal of moving to Level 3 of the CMM, where the software process for both management and engineering is documented, standardized and integrated into a standard software process for the organization. “We realized from the beginning that we didn’t have the manpower and specialized expertise that would be required to achieve Level 3 so we decided from the beginning to seek out a competent partner to guide the implementation,” Hoerr said. “We narrowed the list down to three consultancies and asked them for presentations. David Consulting Group demonstrated an understanding of our organization and requirements that we didn’t see from the others.”
DCG consultants began by mapping existing processes and presenting their findings to management. They rated the existing process areas against the CMM model and catalogued gaps that needed to be satisfied in order to achieve Level 3 certification. Then, they developed procedures based on their findings that drew upon their experience in working with the CMM model, yet designed to mesh with Sanchez’s existing program and capabilities.
In order to minimize the time and disruption required to implement the new methods, DCG recommended the “Big Bang” approach. Rather than piloting the new procedures, Sanchez moved straight into implementation and then made modifications based on the resulting feedback. The DCG team provided training to the project teams that were selected for the rollout, emphasizing that the overall purpose was not to pass an assessment but rather to improve quality while reducing cost and cycle time. The procedures were adjusted based on the results.
In less than 15 months from when the process began, Sanchez management was ready to invite an outside lead assessor, Strategic Quality Alliance, of Boston, Massachusetts, to evaluate their progress. “The assessor spent three weeks conducting interviews and evaluating our documents and work products,” Hoerr said. “In the end they determined that our processes contained all of the CMM Level 2 and 3 key practices and that our projects were following the processes. Since moving from CMM Level 1 to Level 3 normally takes about 45 months, we were delighted with the speed by which we were able to demonstrate that our projects are functioning at CMM Level 3.”
Detecting Defects Early
“The most important change that we noticed as we implemented the new quality system was that these procedures helped us to detect and fix defects much earlier in the process,” Hoerr said. “We now perform peer reviews on 100% of our code and design documents, and every defect we find is entered into a log that provides a vehicle to ensure they are fixed. The process also generates statistics that make it possible to determine exactly at which point the defects are detected and removed, which helps us improve our processes. This data indicated that, by detecting and eliminating defects as early as possible in the development cycle, we saved more than $2 million in the first six months. Finding and fixing defects early eliminates the additional expenses involved in analyzing the impact of a change on the whole system as well as in potential redesigning and recoding when defects are identified later in the cycle.”
Hoerr said that beyond these quantifiable gains, management also believes that the quality of the code developed under the new procedures and now rolling out is exceptionally good. “We don’t have enough historical data yet to quantify the improvement but we have a strong sense that we have made significant gains,” he said. “In addition we have strengthened the organization’s cohesiveness by coming together and accomplishing a major goal. At the same time, the CMM has given us a number of side benefits such a robust training program and applicability of the process to activities outside of software programming such as documentation. What CMM is really all about is implementing common sense procedures and then following them. Now that we have a strong program in place and have demonstrated what it can do for us, we are totally committed to sticking with it.”
Hoerr stressed that DCG’s contribution helped Sanchez, not only quickly attained CMM Level 3 but also achieved documented cost savings that paid for the program in only six months. “DCG did an excellent job of interpreting the key practices in the CMM model to our organization,” Hoerr said. “Early in the implementation process they stressed the importance of training and then provided it at a very high quality level. They also pointed out the importance of senior management involvement., Our senior vice president of Engineering, responded with an unbelievable level of commitment—without which none of this would have happened. All in all, we consider this program to be a major success that will help our organization meet its number one business objective of providing our customers with a superior product.”
®Capability Maturity Model and CMM are U.S. Patent and Trademark Office registered trademarks of Carnegie Mellon University.