Hola Dani,

Cuando leí tu mensaje, lo primero que me vino a la mente fué un texto de Ivar Jacobson al respecto de implantación de un sistema de calidad o el mejoramiento de procesos. Es un texto muy informal pero da algunos puntos de partida importantes. Lo copio debajo...

Luego te enviaré otro que me vino a la mente también.

Suerte!

Right now I am in my home in Switzerland to take a break and ski. I ski during the days and I work mornings and nights. Sleep takes too much time so I do as little as possible of that.:) One of the questions I often get nowadays is "Does Process come from the top or from the bottom?" Before answering I will start with two questions that I usually ask during my presentations.

"How many of you love process?" In a group of 750 people, I usually see 3-5 raised hands. These are of course the people who work with process implementation, and they don't have to follow a process themselves. Then I ask provocatively "How many of you hate process". Now I get a very different answer. Usually 60-70% of the audience raise their hands!

Why is it like that? I believe that in many larger companies process has been pushed down on the people who know how to develop software. This won't work anymore. The competent will speak up to get the process they want, which is good. What worries me though is that the pendulum will swing over to the other extreme. Instead of process push-down we will get process pop–up.

People do as they want. If every team gets their own process, they will not be able to learn from other teams, they will not get common set of tools and they will not harvest reusable assets. What we really need is a balance between push-down and pop-up.

For a very long time (since 1987) I have told my clients that one of the most important success factors for process adoption is to identify both a sponsor and a champion for the process improvement. The champion is a developer with many years of experience, great competence and with high credibility among his comrades. The sponsor is a higher level manager who wants to improve the way his organization develops software to support the company's business. Without support from both don't bother to adopt any new process.

Another of success factor is to use experienced people to coach the team adopting the new process. However in many cases management wants process but doesn't want to invest in coaching. They just hope that people will adopt the process offered to them without proper coaching. As a consequence a lot of organizations have failed in process adoption. Management tried a shortcut, but it became a detour. The money an organization spends on product development is a factor of ten higher than the money it spends on proper coaching. For twenty years I have told my clients that without adequate training and coaching don't bother to adopt any new process.

A third success factor is to balance the need for process from the top (the management) and from the bottom (the developers). This is true for any process whether it is a software development process or a business process. Only working from the bottom is a very slow process, and working only from the top creates a lot of resistance. Unfortunately, in many organizations management pushed down process on people counter to our recommendations. The developers were not enthusiastic but they tried to adopt the new process. That was not easy. Management believed their people were using the process but the developers did what they wanted to do, usually what they always had done. We got a gap, sometimes a huge gap, between what the process said and what people actually did. We call it the process-project gap. Thus we got failures and people started to hate process.

We need to change this. My recipe contains four ingredients:

1. Reduce complexity. Instead of adopting a big process consisting of many practices, adopt a practice at a time. This will significantly reduce the complexity of process improvement.
2. Balance the push-down from the top and the pop-up from the bottom, instead of just doing one or the other.
3. Allow teams to change the practices so they work in their projects. The way you really work must be fed back as a change to the practices. We want a process that is alive and not just a dead book. This allows us to close the gap. One challenge here is of course that traditional process hard-heads will demand that all deviations from the described practices must be documented and perhaps even be given formal exemptions. If that is necessary then people will feel that it is easier to do what is demanded than to do what is right. What we need is a utilitarian perspective on process rather than dogma.:)
4. Activate the practices and bring them alive in a way traditional process has never been able to do. While activated, a practice can help with all kinds of things. It can review what the developers are doing and suggest corrections. It can automate mundane tasks transparent to the developers. It can train the developers on the job reducing the need for classroom training and traditional human mentors. The selected practices should give context-sensitive help to the developers. This means that they should only give the developers help when they want it and only the help they really want and no more. The goal is to give the developers more time to think and create and to remove a substantial part of the no-brain work that developers suffer from today.

We have had a period of process push-down. The pendulum is now swinging to the other extreme – process pop-up. After a few oscillations the pendulum will hopefully swing to a new position where we will get processes that balance both the need for governance and for the need for creativity.

Cheers!

Ivar

--
Rolando.-