Process Improvement

It is time to continue our series of articles on Process Improvement Programs. In the first episode we have talked about Process Improvement Programs - When Are You in Need of One?. Continuing from the brief introduction, I will share an overview on what is available out there in terms of Process Improvement models, and in what kind of scenarios they work best.

We all have encountered various process improvement efforts in the organizations we’ve been engaged in: starting with simple analysis of key processes and trying to make them more efficient to implementing more complex process improvement models like Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), Six Sigma or others. One way or the other, process improvement has been the news for IT organizations for over a decade now - and you might wonder - do we really need it? Why should we do it?

In this article I will try to kick off the discussion by quickly reviewing what is generally meant by process improvement and then going through a few possible problems which might trigger organizations to start considering process improvement efforts.