Making Process Improvement Work
by Neil Potter & Mary Sakry
- GoodReads
- Size: small book (Around 150p, including 45p of annexes).
Outline
- Make a plan based on business goals, and problems limiting their realization
- Execute it:
- sell to the correct stakeholders
- keep focused on the goals
- Measure the success of both plan execution and goal KPIs.
- Cycle
Ideas
- Focus on goals (Why do I want to improve my process.)
- 50% of the impacted persons should be aware and OK with the new process before switch
- Start improvement with small chunks.
- A way to determine what to start with is defining priority from a benefit / cost ratio.
- Goals → Problems (they might be common to several goals) → Solutions (common as well)
- Try out process improvement before going into an edict phase (During which you write the new policies supporting the process).
- Use the adoption curve to determine the correct persons to start improvement with (Innovators + early adopters).
- Beware of side effects when measuring and fixing new targets (Getting wrong behaviour from purely targeting better numbers);
- Process change has to be sold. Resistance to change may come from thinking that proposed solutions don’t fulfill one’s needs, and from fear - try to understand what the issue is, demonstrate new process and outline what the benefits are for laggards.
Other more common stuff
- Problem with improvement frameworks (CMMI + ISO9001) is that they don’t focus on goal.
- State stuff clearly and unambiguously. Should be measurable.