7.4. Examples

Here I’ll show two interesting examples from the wide variety of governance processes and mechanisms in use by enterprise software delivery organizations. One example is drawn from IBM Rational’s software delivery approach and the other from a large bank’s management of its major software supplier.

7.4.1. Product Porfolio Management at IBM Rational

IBM Rational employs over two thousand people who are responsible for delivery of a wide collection of software products. It makes use of a variety of measurement and management approaches as the basis for its governance.

In Figure 7.9, I illustrate the wide variety of software measures that IBM Rational considers valuable to manage. This represents a collective view of all the potentially useful metrics to the organization. In particular, the measures are slotted into four main categories, depending on their role: project health, customer quality, development quality, and strategic health. Together these four categories provide an executive dashboard for management decision making. For each specific product development activity, a selection of these metrics in each category is agreed upon and a baseline set of measures is established. Subsequently, the overall health of the product is assessed in relationship to historical data and trends derived from the baseline.