Productivity Improvement Using 10 Process Commandments

Productivity Improvement Using 10 Process Commandments

The purpose of any industry framework is to guide organizations in establ ishing, documenting, and maintaining an ef fective and economic qual ity management system. This demonstrates to the customers the commitment to quality and ability to supply the customers’ quality needs with improved productivity savings.

In every organization, rework is waste, and across vertical and horizontal business functions, the true cost of quality is often lost. A cost of quality (CoQ) approach looks at processes and events in both a preventive and corrective environment and derives a cost that can be analyzed in the context of the business cycle. The objective of a CoQ approach is to capture the total value of poor quality in the organization and provide a method that justifies the elimination of that poor quality. Understanding the true cost of quality in an organization adds value to the business processes, which in turn, increases its business.

This white paper uses 10 “process commandments” as guiding principles and cost of quality as a metric to derive productivity improvements and present a view on how a process framework was deployed in a large financial and insurance organization.

Introduction

The productivity improvement is a never-ending journey. Many people never take the first step because they do not see the end of the road. Productivity improvement initiatives are often perceived as expensive, when one is not aware of the benefits that they achieve when executed with due diligence. If the process improvement journey is carefully planned and executed, the painstaking investment in the initial cost, effort, and people may be rewarded by overwhelming results. Nothing worthwhile is ever achieved without persistence, and as the famous saying goes “It takes effort to reduce effort. ”

There are several views on how we can achieve breakthrough results using process improvement principles (PIPs). These principles work well and help organizations translate transparent intentions into visible financial results. The key success factors for a process improvement program are continuous improvement, commitment from top management, and a sustainable improvement organization.

Business Case and Problem Statement

The organization is on its journey of process improvement and wanted to improve and streamline its software processes in alignment with its strategic objectives and has chosen SEI CMMI® Version 1.2 process model as best practices against which to be evaluated. The organization’s IT division wanted to determine costs and benefits of implementing CMMI® Maturity Level 3 framework in alignment with its strategic objectives. The business problems were defined as:

o Lack of consistent, repeatable, and effective processes for IT delivery
o Lack of process discipline and process governance
o Non-availability of measurement mechanism to measure and track the productivity improvement

Gap Analysis

The organization’s IT division was strategizing to improve the value of the services they provide to their business partners. A key element of this strategy was to leverage proven industry standard process frameworks such as CMMI®, ITIL, ISO, etc. as a mechanism to drive broad improvements in the quality and reliability of their service delivery. A formal gap analysis against a CMMI® model was conducted. The objective of this gap analysis was to objectively evaluate the organization’s existing processes and then develop detailed action plans to produce timely and measurable impacts to their delivery efforts.The following sets of solutions were designed to:

o Define and deploy quality management system (QMS) an integrated and repeatable process framework that encompasses solution delivery, service delivery, people management, and support practices
o Assess organization’s practices and processes and identify gaps against industry frameworks and provide a roadmap of higher levels of maturity (e.g., CMMI® Maturity Level 3 compliant process framework)
o Demonstrate improvement in product quality and reduce costs

Achieving Solutions

To achieve the above solutions, TCS was chosen as a vendor partner for deploying a process framework. TCS deployed a process framework in the organization using the 10 “process commandments” as guiding principles and a CoQ model as a measurement vehicle to derive productivity improvements.

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