An Aggressive Program for Major Change

Our third scenario assumes that, as is sometimes the case, you do not have the time that the recommended approach described earlier requires. For example, when an organization suffers from such severe problems that any change is perceived as an improvement, a more radical program may be in order, in other words, the potential for improvement is greater than the problems the organization will inevitably encounter. The aggressive approach (see Figure 11.5) uses the process and tools directly in critical projects. These project(s) may still be referred to as pilot project(s), since their objective is to investigate the organization's ability to adopt a certain process and tool environment.

PTEPs. They do all changes in one PTEP project, likely with several iterations in Elaboration and Construction. They use people, potentially contractors, who have previously done PTEPs to minimize risk and to save time. (Of course, we still would recommend that the organization perform continuous process improvement ”see the section Continuous Process Improvement.)
Pilot. They choose a critical project as a pilot project, which guarantees that they will have the most talented people, the strongest management support, and the deepest pockets to pay for necessary training, mentoring, and tool support. The pilot project is interacting with the PTEP on a daily basis. PTEP will steer their activities to address the needs of the pilot project, and will in return get immediate feedback on what works and what does not work.
Software development projects. As soon as the pilot project can be considered a success, the RUP and associated tools are rolled out project-by-project, using the not-yet-finalized version of the process and tool environment produced by the PTEP.

Figure 11.5. An Aggressive Approach to Implementing the RUP and Supporting Tools. When your organization is facing major issues and time is of the essence, you may use an aggressive implementation approach where you have a PTEP that is closely linked to a pilot project. By choosing a pilot project that is critical and high profile, you guarantee that you get the most talented people. Once the pilot project can be considered a success, you roll out the new process and tool environment to the entire organization.

graphics/11fig05.gif

Continuous Process Improvement

Improving projects results ”a bottom-line benefit behind any RUP implementation ”should be an ongoing effort, which means that you should continuously improve the process you follow, the tools you use, and your ability to get new teams and new team members up to speed with the process and tools. Once you are done with your initial RUP adoption program, you should put in place procedures for continually enhancing your process and tool environment. This may include the following:

Creating a team responsible for process and tool enhancements. This team continuously performs minor fixes and initiates additional PTEPs when necessary.
Setting up procedures for feedback from each project. This can be done by making project post-mortems a standard project feature, or by frequently interviewing team members. You can also take advantage of the feedback feature within the RUP product. It allows project members to suggest enhancements or report issues and send these suggestions and comments to IBM Software's RUP development team. Optionally, you can easily redirect these messages to go to your internal process enhancement team.

The availability of reusable assets can radically enhance your ability to develop software. You should consider putting procedures in place that allow you to reuse assets across projects. You may document and package your assets according to a Reuse Asset Specification (RAS), ^[1] which is a standard for documenting and packaging reusable assets. You should also continually survey what reusable assets are available from other companies.

^[1] See http://www.rational.com/rda/index.jsp.