TwitterSoftware Delivery Assessment and Improvement Roadmap
Companies and organizations that develop their own software are faced with a great challenge. Custom software development and delivery has a bad track record. It’s a well-documented fact that over 75% of software development projects fail. This failure results in higher-than-expected delivery cost and reduced business value. Organizations are ‘gun shy’ about new projects and tension is created between IT and Business leaders. However, custom software does deliver value by providing faster customer service, reduced rekeying of information, a streamlining of manual processes and, if leveraged correctly, increased sales per employee. So to some extent custom software is still required.
To capture the value of custom software, the software delivery process has to be exactly that – a repeatable, manageable and measurable ‘process.’ Similar to other processes the organization has established that contribute to its success. Ideally, the process should be modelled around software development ‘Best Practices’ and not around the best tool or fad methodologies in the market today. Tools should support prioritized business dimensions of the firm.
The foundation for the Web Financial Solutions (WFS) SDLC Assessment and Improvement Roadmap is IBM’s MCIF Assessment. We have modified MCIF to be appropriate for smaller teams. The SDLC Assessment is a systematic iterative approach for improving software delivery efficiency that is aligned with business goals and objectives supported by tools and services.
Using proprietary questions to guide us, we gather key business drivers and priorities from the Executive Team based on five business dimensions: Cost, Time to Value, Predictability, Quality and Business Value. Then, by surveying the practitioners through a series of one-hour interviews, we create a Best Practice Improvement Roadmap to align the Practitioners activities to the prioritized business dimensions. This alignment is based on industry best practices, and the result is reduced project failure and team frustration.
The Roadmap details the implementation of processes and best practices that will support the priorities. It should be noted that the roadmap is technology-neutral in that it will recommend specific processes and methodology rather than hardware or software. That being said, it may be possible for WFS to recommend specific tooling that will support those processes.
The SDLC Assessment process requires the availability of business and IT Management for a kick-off meeting and subsequent one- to two-hour interviews. After that WFS will undertake a series of interviews with the IT staff. This process typically takes several days to complete. The roadmap is usually produced in several more days and presented to business and IT management. If the company decides to move forward with the roadmap a Self-Check tool is provided so that improvement can be measured over time.
WFS can provide mentoring and services to support the best practices and Self-Check if the company desires.
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