Getting Started With Process Management

Have you struggled to lower online courseware development costs, reduce cycle time, and enhance the quality of your courses? The real solution lies not in simply changing tools, environment or people. Instead, you must look at how these elements work together to create courseware. You must look at your development process.

Process improvement activities allow you to focus on what is important for your business: exceeding customer expectations while still earning a profit.

We've all investigated ways to lower online courseware development costs, reduce cycle time, and enhance the quality of course development projects. Maybe you've looked for easy solutions to achieve these lofty goals. You've purchased the newest technologies, sent people to training, changed your work environment, and applied the latest motivational techniques. While these efforts may seem appropriate on the surface, the real answer lies deeper: in your development process. You need to explore how people, tools, and environment work in concert to create courseware.

Regardless of the size of your development projects or your development team, process improvement activities allow you to focus on what is important for your business -- exceeding customer expectations of price, schedule and quality -- while still earning a profit.

Without clearly defined and documented processes, you frequently will be forced to rely on extraordinary, heroic efforts by your team to meet your development schedule. Most likely you will have to compromise the integrity of the product. This is a recipe for disaster. Not only do disorganized processes damage your relationship with your customer, they also take a toll on your team. Eventually, after one too many rides on this roller coaster, your team will begin to look elsewhere for employment. As your team members leave, with them go all of the bits and pieces of your ad hoc processes and the undocumented lessons that the team has learned.

So, if you want to improve your processes, where do you start?

First, recognize that most attempts at process improvement fail!

That being said, your efforts don't have to be doomed for failure. There are reasons many process improvement activities fail, but most, if not all, failures are avoidable if you have a plan and maintain your commitment. You should also focus your activities where you can achieve the greatest benefits. In other words, grab the big pieces of low-hanging fruit first!

There are many resources available to help you through your process improvement activities. You may want to begin by looking at the work of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/)

Using knowledge acquired from software process assessments and extensive feedback from both industry and government, SEI produced the Capability Maturity Model for Software (CMM). (Remember, you are developing software!) The CMM defines five levels of process capability, each of which represents an evolutionary plateau towards a disciplined, measured, and continuously improving software process.

The 5 CMM levels can be summarized in the following way:

1 - The Initial Level: Ad hoc		Success depends on individual efforts and heroics.
2 - The Repeatable Level		Basic project management is used to track cost, schedule, and functionality.
3 - The Defined Level		Processes are documented and standardized over the organization.
4 - The Managed Level		Metrics are collected and analyzed on process and product quality. Processes are quantitatively controlled.
5 - The Optimizing Level		Continuous process improvement activities.

Process improvement can't be treated as "just another program" or as "the flavor of the month." Successful process improvement requires the blending of many elements. Management must demonstrate leadership through consistent behaviors that reflect support for the initiative, thereby helping to create a culture in which there is a focus on quality and open assessment of the performance of the organization as a whole. Time and resources must be allocated and priority placed on the timely completion of improvement activities. Courseware developers must continuously examine the process and follow a systematic approach for improvement.

Submitted by Jerome Gotz, Engagement Manager, MediaPro