Using Assessments and Standards to Improve Your Process
Process improvement is a fundamental endeavor that any successful organization must embrace and perform effectively. Many organizations manage and improve their business processes with excellence, but all too often technology professionals struggle with assessing and approving the way they conduct their day-to-day activities.
In configuration management, processes may include source code management, application build, and release engineering. Although DevOps is driving effective deployment processes, release coordination, change control, and environment monitoring are equally important. The challenges many companies face are where to start and how to effectively implement IT process improvement.
There are many formal process improvement methodologies, including Six Sigma, kaizan, kanban, and lean agile. Each of these disciplines has its proponents and success stories, and each is also not without its detractors who do not believe it is worth the effort required to implement. Formal methodologies do have much to offer, but I often find that it is equally effective to start at the beginning and implement process improvement using a very basic (and older) methodology that I learned to refer to as appreciative inquiry.
My approach involves interviewing the key stakeholders who understand the processes in detail. When possible, I try to also understand senior management views, including goals and their perception of pain points. But senior managers may not have enough of a detailed on-the-ground understanding of exactly what occurs on a daily basis. Therefore, it is essential to interview the subject matter experts who do the actual hands-on work.
I typically ask them what they do and then what specifically is working well. They will usually explain the problems they are having, and they often have a very good idea of what needs to be fixed in order to improve the process. Once the assessment is completed, I have a very good understanding of the current baseline of existing processes.
Assessing based on your own personal experience can be very limiting—even if you have been doing this type of work for many years. There are just so many technologies and approaches, and we need valid criteria to assess existing best practices. The good news is that there are a number of standards and frameworks that illustrate industry best practices in great detail.
The ITIL v3 framework is an excellent source of IT processes, including release control and validation, which specifically describe change control, build, release, and deployment engineering. I have also used the details within ISACA’s COBIT framework, along with the very authoritative ISO and IEEE standards, including the well-respected IEEE 828, which describes configuration management across the lifecycle.
Keep in mind that improving processes requires that you measure and evaluate against valid criteria so you can clearly demonstrate what has improved. You also need to understand that process improvement does not happen overnight.
Continuous process improvement requires both planning and what quality management gurus refer to as consistency of purpose. Successful organizations value process improvement and ensure that these approaches are firmly ingrained in their organizational cultures.
