Brought a seroiously troubled SEI SW-CMM attainment project to success within a very tight schedule

Situation

The outsourced organization was running behind schedule and contractual date was going to be missed. Multiple contracts had to be combined into one for the purpose of the SEI assessment. Executive management did not understand the level of commitment required to successfully achieve the Software Engineering Institute’s Software-Capability Maturity Model (SEI SW-CMM) Level 2. The customer was unhappy with the lack of specific application development metrics that would show a decrease in defects and productivity improvements.

Action Plan

• Met with the customer to explain a clear new strategy for the SEI SW-CMM assessments. Combining multiple assessments into one would facilitate the deployment of process throughout the organization and the attainment of the SEI SW-CMM levels.
• Mentored executive and senior management on the actions and words to be consistently and regularly communicated to the organization.
• Leveraged existing Application Development / Maintenance (ADM) metrics and suggested additional ones to provide the customer with specifics regarding productivity improvement and defect reduction.
• Organized the core process team to ensure proper coverage of the Key Process Areas for SEI SW-CMM level 2.
• Introduced specific tools to measure organizational adherence to process. These “temperature checks” greatly facilitated process understanding and provided measurements for process adherence throughout the delivery organization.
• Leveraged SQA metrics and regularly reported results of SQA audits to senior management.

Results

The project was turned around and ADM metrics identified productivity increases as well as defect reduction. Executive and senior management support became visible and customer satisfaction improved significantly. The contract was restructured to ensure assessment efficiencies. The offshore resources were effectively incorporated into the assessment and SEI SW-CMM Level 2 was attained.