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process improvement Managing Change - Moving from Waterfall to Iterative The consequences of changing your software development process are not limited only to your software team. If you are making the transition from a waterfall process to an iterative approach, change will occur in almost every area of your organization involved with product development: how Project Management tracks projects, how you measure conformance to requirements, how and when QA tests, when you staff various job roles, even how you budget your projects -- all of these, and more, can be affected. Evanetics can assist your organization by identifying where the greatest ROI can be obtained with the least disruption to your organization. Sustainable Process Evanetics' goal is to achieve sustainable process for our clients. Whether we assist you in improving your existing development process, or by introducing an entirely new process, we succeed only if your development team can continue succeeding after we leave your location. A sustainable process is one which is wholly embraced by the people carrying out the activities of that process, so they do not have to consciously think about what they should be doing. A beneficial process is one that conforms to, and supports, the business, cultural and technical goals of the owning organization--your company. A useful process is not an obstacle to the people working within that process. Our approach is team-focused and delivery-oriented, and involves all of the stakeholder groups in a software project. Many development processes focus deeply, but only on the requirements definition or code generation activities. In dynamic systems small improvements in many areas of the system yield more benefit than highly optimizing a single component of the system. We assess every part of your development process to find the most promising areas where limited, local improvements can have global return on investment. We are expert in Rational™ Unified Process, agile Unified Process, and Scrum. We pride ourselves on being "agents of change", and we will work with you to implement a process that satisfies your goals, in your culture, and in your timeframe. Shared Vision If the members of your project team do not agree on the goals of the project, it will fail. Mismatched understanding of the goals translates into confusion about the problem to be solved, the solution approach to be used, and how you know when you have delivered the right product. Evanetics recognizes that creating a shared vision of the project, the problem, and the solution is critical to the project's success. Creating a shared vision requires that all the project members participate in the execution of the project over the project's lifetime, not just at the project kickoff, or at the end of development. This often requires eliminating organizational barriers that hinder communication on the project, and sensitivity to the psychological defenses that arise when people feel threatened by change. Reducing Risk Risk is whatever has potential to produce undesirable results on your project. Risk cannot be eliminated, but it can be managed and reduced. Risk must be honestly confronted and identified, management and mitigation plans must be developed, and continual feedback must be obtained to determine if the mitigation plans are effective. A risk which has become actual is an issue, and usually must be dealt with immediately. If risk planning has not occurred, on-going issue management can monopolize your resources and defeat your project focus. Eliminating Uncertainty Uncertainty is a major component of risk. Risk cannot be eliminated, but uncertainty can. Traditional software processes attempt to achieve certainty at the beginning of a project through formal methods, large documentation efforts, or prolonged delivery schedules. But uncertainty still prevails. In agile processes we accept that we cannot attain certainty up-front about everything on our project. We just have to achieve certainty about the small part of our system we are working on in our current development iteration. By limiting the scope of our focus we eliminate distractions, and we can make decisions more efficiently. Evanetics has the following White Paper to assist you in your understanding of the Evanetics philosophy, and of agile processes. |
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