Effective Software Project Management

How Will You Get There?

This is your continuous SDPM Process Improvement Program. Plan on spending all of your days with some level of involvement in this program. It will never end. In the beginning there will be lots of improvement initiatives. At some point that will level off and move more into a monitoring program, but it will still be a continuous improvement program. Figure 39-2 is a continuous process improvement process that I have used successfully for several years. It fits very well the Adaptive Project Framework model. In fact, the Adaptive Project Framework model was designed to accommodate process improvement projects and programs.

Figure 39-2. A continuous process improvement program process

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You can see that this process answers all of the questions posed in the last chapter and this one. Each step in this four-phase process model is discussed in the following sections.

Assess Process Effectiveness

First of all, process in the context of this section may refer to the entire project management process or to just one of the 44 processes that make it up. (A complete description of these processes can be found in the Project Management Institute’s publication: A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, Third Edition, 2004.) It will be clear from the context what is being referred to.

My approach is to assess both the process and practice ...