Set Up, or initiation, involves selling the concept of process improvement to the organization, planning the effort, securing funds and staff, and structuring the effort. Most organizations become aware of process improvement through conferences, books, articles in industry magazines, or, most prominently, when achieving maturity levels becomes the basis for contract award. An individual is usually chosen as the "champion," who literally promotes the process improvement effort throughout the organization. This promotion may entail doing research on Return on Investment (ROI), budget allocations within the organization, and cost-benefit analyses. For those of you tasked with this responsibility, the SEI (Software Engineering Institute) provides information on its Web site, www.sei.cmu.edu. While the information on this Web site changes from time to time, you can find data under "Community Profiles" and under the Publications directory.
After the executives have been satisfied that process improvement should be attempted, initiate an Engineering Process Group (EPG). The EPG's role is to establish and prioritize process improvement actions, produce plans to accomplish the actions, and commit resources to execute the plans. The EPG also either writes the processes or assigns personnel to write the processes, and then reviews and updates them. More about roles and responsibilities in Chapter 13.
Planning is critical, and during Set Up, planning is the primary activity. While the plans for each organization differ , there are certain plans that seem to be commonly used among different organizations. They are:
Process Improvement (PI) Plan: high-level strategic plans that document the organization's vision of process improvement and success factors, and justify the initial budget for this effort
Implementation/Operations Plan: tactical-level plans that discuss the formation of specific groups and include deliverables and timetables
Action Plans: very specific plans that address specific weaknesses and organizational problems discovered during an assessment or other organizational process baselining technique
Guidelines and templates for these plans are included in Chapter 15.