The Story of Process Improvement for Humongous Insurance

Chase and his team finally did it. They released an entirely new product line for Humongous Insurance on time and on budget. The management at Humongous Insurance is very impressed and realizes that Chase’s team possessed something very special to have achieved this momentous challenge in such short a period of time. The company approached Chase to see whether he would be interested in taking on yet another challenge; spreading his best practices across the organization so that other teams could benefit from his approach.

After some deliberation and thought, Chase decides to accept this new challenge and to take a more practical approach to organizational process improvement. Chase understands that for process improvement practices to be used, all teams within the organization must embrace them, and that means that he must get them involved throughout the process improvement process instead of trying to force new practices on them without their input.

Chase’s first job is to meet with Humongous Insurance management. Chase tries to determine exactly what the organization expects from process improvement such as how much money and how many resources the company is willing to invest into the project. Chase makes it clear that he will be needing time from virtually all the product groups in the organization to gather feedback and to perform certain process improvement activities. Chase wants to make it clear that project workloads and schedules will probably be affected in the short term, but the results will more than pay for the initial productivity loss. After his meeting with management, Chase captures these requirements and constraints in a Vision/Scope document for the process improvement project and asks management for explicit approval to begin the project.

Chase’s first job is to select his project’s primary team members. This group must best represent all of the roles and projects within the organization. He selects a number of lead developers, three developers from three different product lines, the corporate chief software architect, the lead testers of two other large projects, and two of the sales and marketing staff. Chase also contracts a well-known consultant to help facilitate and guide their assessment and planning workshops and calls a kickoff meeting with the entire team. During this meeting, Chase walks the team through the project charter document and discusses the expectations of the team as they move forward through process improvement. At this time, Chase also schedules a process improvement assessment workshop with his entire team to be facilitated by the consultant. The consultant asks the team member to prepare for the workshop by consulting with their colleagues in all the organization’s development teams to compile lists of the tools, templates, and practices currently used through the company.

During the assessment workshop, the consultant leads the team through exercises designed to capture aspects of their software development processes that worked very well in addition to aspects that need improvement. The consultant also gathers opinions from the group as to what the team members think could be done to improve the weaker areas of their project and what might prevent them from successfully implementing those changes. During the assessment workshop, the energy of the team was heightened as everyone was more than happy to provide feedback into the organization that will eventually result in higher quality software, fine-tuned processes, and a more positive work environment. In order to better focus the team, the consultant decides to look at different aspects of the organization’s software development practices individually, starting with program and product management areas, followed by software architecture, development, testing, operations, and finally, user experience. The assessment results are next distributed to the team for their review as the assessment will be the foundation for the process improvement planning workshop scheduled for the following week.

At the kickoff of the planning workshop, Chase begins by first thanking the team for their open and honest feedback on the organization’s current software development practices. He’s very happy that the initial discussions stayed positive and that the team worked to stay productive and focused. Chase explains that the planning exercises will need to be just as focused for the team to come to conclusions regarding the process improvement activities they will perform first. During the planning workshop, the consultant works with the team to further rank the results of the assessment. With the help of the entire team, the consultant begins to create a process improvement plan broken into twelve one-month iterations in which assigned work will be carried out by the team. The process improvement work that is derived from the highest priority areas of the assessment (for example, the greatest opportunities and mitigations for the highest-ranked process weaknesses) are scheduled first, making sure that everyone agrees on the results they are trying to achieve every iteration. The resulting plan is then sent to management for review and approval. Once approved, the team meets briefly one more time to begin the execution phase of the project.

During the process improvement Execution phase, many activities are undertaken by the team in different areas. For example, the entire organization will attend training on Visual Studio Team System. In addition, the product managers work more closely with the sales and marketing departments to set a better requirement management process that will be used with their existing customers to track requirements for their product line. The developers and the software architect work on processes that will have all teams conduct specific review meetings throughout the development process such as design planning meetings, design reviews, code reviews, and operational reviews. Another group will be setting methods of harvesting and communicating these new processes. This group will be responsible for updating Visual Studio Team System process templates to ensure that all new processes are reflected and accurately documented. They are also responsible for ensuring that any new document template, such as a Microsoft Office Word document template used to store the results of a design review meetings, are appropriately integrated into the Visual Studio Team System process template definitions.

During the execution phase of the project, Chase decides to track the project by using Visual Studio Team System. All work specified in the process improvement planning document is represented as work items within Visual Studio Team System. Chase also instructs the team to store all related process improvement documentation and templates in the project portal running under Windows SharePoint Services. The default reports that ship with Visual Studio Team System also provide an easy way to communicate project status with Humongous Insurance management.

As the project continues month by month, the project team realizes they may have taken on more than they can handle, and as a result, during a project review meeting at the end of the third iteration, the project team decides to refocus their activities to accommodate the December holiday season. The team also agrees to remove some goals from their current pass of process improvement because they have realized that achieving these goals will probably not result in the value they anticipated at the beginning of the project. The modification of the plan by the project team ensures that they will continue to meet every goal they have set out to meet at the end of every iteration and, thus, continue to breed results that resonate throughout the organization. Some of the other process improvements include establishing continuous build policies, manual testing practices, increased developer/tester interaction practices, and the creation of deployment and operational checklists and more refined software update and deployment processes.

At the end of the first execution phase of process improvement at Humongous Insurance, the results of process improvement have begun to become apparent through all aspects of the organization. For the first time, Humongous Insurance now has the ability to understand their software development processes starting from requirements received from customers and spanning the entire development life cycle reaching into operations and support. One of the key focuses of the initial phase of process improvement was the adoption of a quality-first mindset from every aspect of the business. As a result, the company now has the ability to measure efficiencies and quality in many areas of their business that traditionally seemed immeasurable. They have seen decreases in defect rates, higher-quality budgeting and estimating, and most importantly, greater customer satisfaction. What is even more apparent is the overall attitude of the organization’s staff. Before the process improvement project began, the staff seemed very disconnected, if not apathetic to many aspects of quality and delivery throughout the organization. The staff members, starting with those directly involved with the process improvement project, now seem energized and enthusiastic and ultimately proud of their accomplishments after being empowered to embrace the responsibility of improving their roles within the organization. Chase was determined to maintain a steady rate of success throughout the process, and even those who doubted the impact of the project are now convinced of the value of practical and focused process improvement activities. It is this mindset shift that will form an even more important foundation for the next cycle of process improvement.

At project completion, twelve months after they began, Chase calls a project review meeting with the entire project team in addition to Humongous Insurance management. During this meeting, the team reflects on the previous twelve months and attempts to determine how they could improve the overall process for the future. Chase also asks the management team to discuss the impact of process improvement across the organization and compare the results with what they expected. Chase and management work together to set the focus of the next cycle of process improvement and once again provide confirmation of the constraints that will need to be adhered to during the next cycle. At the end of the review meeting, Chase schedules the next series of assessment and planning workshops that will guide the next cycle of process improvement.