DCG Newsletter December 2008: Process Improvement Pays

Global IT organizations execute processes on a daily basis. For those organizations whose success or failure depends on software processes to deliver IT value, the risk of low performance is managed and mitigated by policies and procedures developed over time and sometimes based on one of more popular frameworks such as ITIL, CMMI, COBIT, ISO as well as blended and homegrown approaches.

Implementing standards and frameworks can contribute to higher performance but improvements plateau after the initial benefits gain period. The low-hanging fruit of common language, improved communications, interlocking decision making is quickly picked.

Framework fatigue sets in and processes that once had promise to deliver higher performance become institutional procedures disconnected from measured value. Over time, process improvement is seen as a cost that does not pay.

When the internal conventional Water Cooler Discussion

wisdom or the talk around the water cooler dismisses process improvement as an annual management fad people have to endure, well, you may have a problem.

Other signs? When your process improvement budgets are cut during economic hard times as easily as "education and training" budget dollars are cut, it means your internal culture has devalued process improvement as another "have to do" budget item that is expendable.

Changing the discourse or culture is not easy. For those internal champions who believe that performing better is part of the job, there is nothing stronger to help your case than hard evidence rather than opinion.

So how do you collect hard, objective evidence? You measure not for measurement sake but for IT value. An IT value centric measurement strategy means your measurements are linked to business goals that contribute value. An expert in the field told me once that he believes "80% of process improvement dollars are wasted unless the outcomes are linked to business goals."

Football strategy

Our measurement roadmap process is not complicated but it does require hard work and political courage. We have found it the best mechanism to create stakeholder ownership in measurements and metrics that are objective and contribute to IT value in good times and bad. As you look forward to 2009, consider wrapping your process improvement initiatives with a measurement framework that makes your process improvement pay and not just cost.

DCG Editorial Staff