Target Audience:
Senior Managers, EPG members, process improvement champions

Level: Just starting

What will you learn :
"When people leave this presentation they will be able to understand:

• Software and systems engineering economics
• Costs of Poor Quality
• How poor quality costs affect productivity
• How productivity gains can be realized and monetized
• Typical costs & benefits for CMMI efforts
• The various equations that encompass “Return on Investment”
• Organizational change best practices
• Organizational improvement change infrastructure
• Untethered activities

Description:
In this tutorial, learn how to determine and justify the business and financial impact of a CMMI-based improvement effort, plan for and mitigate the ever-present people-oriented risks using organizational change best practices, and learn about and overcome insidious “untethered activities” that lead to project delays and poor quality software.

Demonstrating the value of CMMI-based improvement efforts is recognized as being a difficult proposition, particularly for less mature organizations with little or no measurement capabilities in place. With resources in scarce supply, CMMI efforts increasingly must be able to show superior value compared to other programs in the organization’s portfolio. In particular, Return on Investment (ROI) must be demonstrated to the organization’s leadership, many of whom don’t know (or need to know) many details about the model or its implementation. They simply care that the effort brings financial value. In addition, people’s behaviors much be changed. All too often, improvement efforts are approached from a technical perspective, instead of the more effective people perspective. Failure to properly manage the financial and people aspects of a CMMI improvement effort almost always lead to costly re-starts, or in the worst cases, cancellation. Finally, untethered activities are fairly common in lower-maturity organizations and they have a profound negative impact on project performance and success. Learn about these untethered activities and how the CMMI helps to avoid them while improving project predictability and quality.

Outline:

• Introduction and Logistics
  • Software engineering economics
• ROI of CMMI: How, What, When, and Why?
  • How do organizations calculate ROI? How can they do it better?
  • What information is needed in order to calculate ROI? What information is inappropriate?
  • When should these ROI calculations be performed? When can you compare ROI results across organizations?
  • Why should an organization attempt to calculate the ROI of CMMI-based efforts? is ROI the right way to show financial value?
• Organizational change best practices: It’s a people problem, not a technical problem!
  • A set of best practices for Managing the people aspects of an improvement effort
  • A practical mechanism for an improvement infrastructure
• Untethered activities: the real reason for project schedule slips
  • What are they?
  • How do they affect project performance?
  • How does the CMMI address them?
•  Wrap-Up

Prerequisites:
None

Presenter:
Rolf W. Reitzig, President and Founder
cognence, inc.

Rolf W. Reitzig is the president and founder of cognence, inc. Mr. Reitzig has more than 18 years experience across multiple software engineering disciplines and has helped dozens of Fortune 500 companies improve quality, productivity and project results. cognence is a Software Engineering Institute (SEI) CMMI partner and Mr. Reitzig is a Resident Affiliate assisting the SEI in communicating the return on investment of CMMI efforts to the software development community. Mr. Reitzig speaks regularly at international conferences, seminars and user groups sponsored by the SEI as well as software engineering automation tool providers like IBM Rational and Serena. He also coaches senior managers, helping them understand the economics of process improvement and its implications on organizational change. Mr. Reitzig holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and an MBA in Finance from the University of Colorado.