12.3 IMPLEMENTATION

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Even if you have a clear mandate for the implementation of your metrics initiative you still depend upon cooperation from your customers. You must communicate with your customers and communication, along with all other aspects of implementation, takes effort. That is the key point that you must drive home to your organization: implementation is not free even though most of the creative work has, or at least should have been done beforehand.

Implementation is the most deceptive and risky stage of this whole lifecycle. Look, for instance, at this chapter. It is a very short chapter and the activities it identifies are few. The reason for this is that the planning, the designing and the constructing of the metrics program has been done during earlier stages and this, the implementation stage, is simply a question of transferring technology from a few areas to every area. This need not be difficult or complex but it does cost!

Now imagine the following situation. You have 20 product groups within which you wish to implement Software Metrics. Even with a mandate to implement from on high you will still need to sell metrics to those product groups and their managers. I say again, you can tell teams to measure until you are blue in the face. You have to sell them on the idea!

Having sold the concept you have to train people, you have to support them and you have to help people make the concepts of the program work. It all takes time. If you were to allow thirty days of internal consultancy effort per product team just to sell them the concepts and get them over the first hump of the learning curve that would not be excessive.

That means that we are talking about 600 person-days of effort across the twenty teams for initial support. You will also have to maintain contact with those teams, albeit at a much reduced rate, for some considerable time. If you do not keep this contact up, and I would recommend at least one day per month for twelve months, then the team could backslide and you may as well not have bothered.

Of course these figures are generalizations but you may be surprised at how close they are to your own particular support costs.

One final point regarding implementation. The biggest problem that you may face may be with your facilitators or support staff. Do not expect them to be able to make the transition to their new role overnight because for most of them this will be a complete change. We must accept that we work in a technical industry. Good support staff have experience of that technical side of our work, are possibly very good at it because they should really have a deeper understanding of it than the average engineer.

However, far beyond that in terms of importance is an ability to operate in what is basically a sales environment. Many IT people find this very difficult.

There is a very interesting book called "The Strategy of the Dolphin," Lynch (1) . This book has a model for classifying people as carps, sharks or dolphins. I find this a very pleasing model and will simply say that what you want as supporters or facilitators are dolphins.

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