“This book hits the mark for three important issues:

• How to keep focused on real improvements

• How to develop an implementable improvement plan

• How to develop meaningful and useful measurements

I will definitely recommend it to my clients who are just beginning or are having trouble with their improvement program.”
—Norman Hammock, SEI Authorized Lead Assessor

“At last a common sense and business-oriented approach to process improvement. This book gives very practical instruction that is easy to apply. Your people will thank you for it.”
—Nancy K. M. Rees, Vice President and Chief Engineer, Xerox Corporation

“...gets right to the heart of process improvement with specific, concrete steps and excellent examples. It’s a book you can use today.”
—Dennis J. Frailey, Principal Fellow, Raytheon Company

“Too many organizations develop a checklist mentality targeted at achieving the next process maturity level or passing an audit...Neil and Mary remind us to focus on pragmatic mechanisms for achieving superior business results...”
—Karl Wiegers, Principal Consultant, Process Impact

Software process improvement too often reflects a significant disconnect between theory and practice. This book bridges the gap—offering a straightforward, systematic approach to planning, implementing, and monitoring a process improvement program. Project managers will appreciate the book’s concise presentation style and will be able to apply its practical ideas immediately to real-life challenges.

With examples based on the authors’ own extensive experience, this book shows how to define goals that directly address the needs of your organization, use improvement models appropriately, and devise a pragmatic action plan. In addition, it reveals valuable strategies for deploying organizational change, and delineates essential metrics for tracking your progress. Appendices provide examples of an action plan, a risk management plan, and a mini-assessment process.

You will learn how to:

• Scope and develop an improvement plan

• Identify and prioritize risks and mitigate anticipated difficulties

• Derive metrics that accurately measure progress toward business goals

• Sell your improvement program in-house

• Initially target practitioners and projects most-open to new approaches and techniques

• Stay focused on goals and problems

• Align the actions of managers and practitioners

• Delay major policy documents and edicts until solutions have been practiced and tested

• Use existing resources to speed deployment

• Incorporate improvement models, such as SEI CMM^® and CMMI^SM, into your improvement program

For those managers who are tired of chronic project difficulties, constant new improvement schemes, and a lack of real progress, this easily digestible volume provides the real-world wisdom you need to realize positive change in your organization.

0201775778B02262002

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 11 Ratings

UN-common sense strategies - 2002-04-05
Reviewer Rating:
This is one of those books that you'd think would be common sense knowledge, but isnt. I've been working in process improvement for 22 years and this is the first book I've found that collects all of the strategies I've found successful in one place!

The book starts by showing how easy it is to get "lost in the trees" (and kill a bunch of them in the process) if you try to "do CMM" like most people do the first time around. The authors do a great job of showing how to keep the main thing (delivering better quality software) the main thing and avoid creating mountains of useless documentation.

I would recommend that anyone looking at achieving higher levels of maturity in CMM, SPICE, or ISO 9000 read this and take a reality check on their plans.

Tells you how to "just do it" - 2002-11-15
Reviewer Rating:
The development of quality software has proven to be one of the most difficult tasks ever to arise in the brains of humans. With so many ways to fail and so few paths to success, there is not a single software shop without a great deal of room for improvement. However, determining that a shop needs to improve is about as difficult as hitting the ground if you slip on ice. The hard part is identifying where the changes should be made and making sure that real change is done rather than some simple shuffling of resources or pointless changing of names.
That point is where this book becomes valuable. It is a concise document, describing in broad, but not excruciatingly fine detail how to improve processes for managing the construction of software. The names of the chapters summarize the basics of any well-constructed process: developing a plan, implementing the plan and checking progress. It also gives you sound advice as to how to track the changes in the process, so important to convince those doing the changing that what you are doing is in their interest.
I recommend that all managers of software development projects examine this book. It will also show you how to stay on track, as it is all too easy to find excuses to significantly deviate from any plan.

Pragmatic Process Improvement! - 2002-04-03
Reviewer Rating:
The numerous examples, cases, graphs, and templates give the reader the tools to start the improvements in his or her own organization. Furthermore, the book is fun and easy to read. To me and my colleagues, it'll be very useful!

Basically a Primer - 2006-12-31
Reviewer Rating:
If you are absolutely brand-new to process improvement (I was), this book will be useful for you. It will teach you the basics of Goal-Question-Measurement (GQM), how to get some visibility to your efforts, etc. However, its shelf-life is rather short, and it does not lend itself well as a reference.

If you've been through a process improvement initiative before, or if you're in an organization that takes this kind of stuff mildly seriously already, most of this will be review and self-evident.

Advice So Practical, It Makes you Wonder Why SPI Is So Hard! - 2003-08-14
Reviewer Rating:
This book is simply fantastic. Neil Potter and Mary Sakry show you, simply and clearly, how to tie your process improvement activities to the things that matter in your business. Rather than an onerous "why are we improving for improvement sake", this book shows how to find what hurts, make it better and raise maturity regardless of what improvement model you may use. The book can be read in about an hour, and there are many appendicies that provide practical and easy to understand examples. Reading the book doesn't make process improvement easy (change is never easy), but it puts you down the right path. The best chance of institutionalizing real process improvement is through solving the real problems of the company and its employees and customers.

I especially recommend that company executives read this book, since they often set the tone for a process improvement effort.

This book is a must read for anyone heading up a process improvement practice.

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