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H1: Defining Effective Process and Performance Goals and Measures
Michael West

Introduction:

Once your organization has established a business case for process improvement, it needs to define measurable performance goals to be obtained through process improvement. This tutorial enables managers and process focus personnel define performance goals and measures, which serve as the basis for realistic process improvement plans to achieve the goals.

This one-day tutorial will take participants through a process (based on Goal-Question-Metric principles) that defines an entire life cycle for performance measurement. The tutorial identifies simple, easy to implement steps for defining goals, planning measurement activities, and then analyzing and using measures to determine improvements.

You will leave this tutorial with practical knowledge and work products that enable you to establish an effective performance and process improvement measurement program.

Learning Objectives:

Learn how to define goals to drive performance improvement and yield results
Learn how to define performance goals that can be measured
Learn how to define measures that can be used to determine the achievement of performance goals
Learn what it takes to establish and institutionalize a performance goal and measurement program that yields results
Learn what works and what doesn't work in performance goal and measurement programs

Outline:

Introduction and setting expectations
- What do you know, what do you not know (a quiz with prizes)
- What do you want to know
- Overview of the tutorial, logistics, and protocols
- Is this tutorial for you?
- Exercise : When measurements attack: war stories from the wounded
Goal and measurement taxonomy
- Definition for “goal”
- Measurement-related definitions
- Exercise : Building a goal and measurement dictionary for your organization
Planning and managing the goal/measurement project
- Defining the “why” for embarking on this effort
- Organizational culture and measurement-based performance improvement
- Defining the requirements for a goal/measurement project
- Estimating and planning the goal/measurement project
- Identifying goal/measurement roles and responsibilities
- Identifying goal/measurement stakeholders
- Defining deliverables and results: what will success look and feel like
- Exercise : Planning the goal/measurement project in your organization
Defining performance goals
- The characteristics of a “good” goal using Goal Articulation Criteria (GAC)
- Sources for goals
- Defining goals within the context of the organization's business
- From strategy to goals: aligning subordinate goals at different levels within the organization
- Exercise : Verify a goal from your organization using the GAC
Defining goal-based measures
- A simple measure definition process
- Establish a plan
- Identifying questions and management information needs
- Defining measures
- Identifying performance improvement actions
- Implement changes/execute improvement actions
- Determine goal achievement
- Iterate: refine/redefine goals and measures
- Exercise : Complete a Goal Action Plan worksheet
- Exercise : Complete a Measurement Definition worksheet
Executing the goal/measurement project
- Integrating measurement collection, analysis, and reporting into software/system projects
- Who collects and analyzes measures
- To whom are measures reported, and what do they do with them
- Do's and Don'ts
Tutorial summary
- Questions, answers, and discussion
- What will you do with this knowledge?
- Sources for more information

Biography:

Michael West has over 25 years experience in software and systems development and engineering management, and more than 10 years in model-based process improvement. Mr. West is author of Real Process Improvement Using the CMMI (Auerbach, 2004), and has delivered numerous presentations on process improvement at national conferences such as the SEI's SEPG Conference and the NDIA's CMMI Users Conference.

In 2002, Mr. West and his business partners established the process improvement consultancy Natural SPI, a small, woman-owned business and an SEI Partner. Natural SPI has developed and implemented innovative, cost-effective methods that help their clients achieve process and performance improvement goals.

Michael
West

This seminar focuses on implementing successful software quality assurance techniques to improve results. At the end of this seminar you will know and be able to:

H4: Defect Prevention: How to do it right the First Time
Nidhi Srivastava

H5: Managing Incremental and Highly Iterative Software Projects: Surviving in a Quasi Agile Environment
Dr. Timothy Korson

Most corporations are still fairly traditionally structured even though many software development teams are heading full steam into modern incremental, and highly iterative software development techniques and exploring other new technologies such as MDA. This leaves management stuck coping with an organizational and technical paradigm shift that traditional project management practices are inadequate to handle. In the highly iterative, fast-paced environment characteristic of these modern software development projects, traditional approaches to budgeting, testing, quality assurance, requirements gathering, scheduling and estimating break down. Managers trying to encourage best practices as recommended by CMMI and SPICE find themselves at odds with developers trying to adopt best practices as recommended by the agile manifesto. In the end no one wins. Because of the constraints of corporate policies and management edicts, developers can't fully adopt modern software engineering practices. Because the developers do adopt as much of the iterative processes as they can get away with, team leads find that traditional approaches to management don't work. Such projects must succeed in what I call a quasi agile development environment.

In my experience these quasi agile development environments characterize a large percentage of today's significant software projects. Lack of explicit understanding of this reality, and failure to actively adapt to it, is causing significant problems in many software development organizations.

This tutorial explains practical ways to adapt the formal process control inherent in CMMI recommendations to the more flexible practices of agile development.

Organizations are under increasing pressure to reduce costs and improve efficiency even as IT service requirements increase. The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides a complete framework of best practices for meeting this challenge. In this tutorial, you will learn the key concepts and processes of ITIL, and apply them to a case study organization.

ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practices, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organizations, and implementation and assessment tools. The best practice processes promoted in ITIL are internationally recognized as the standard for IT Service Management and is rapidly emerging in the United Stated with the support of most industry leaders.