ABSTRACT
Reducing product cost, improving product quality, and optimizing the overall product strategy from positioning to reuse, are goals in practically all companies to stay competitive, to continuously improve business, and to survive in a fast changing environment. It is thus crucial for most companies to simultaneously 336improve project management, product development, and engineering processes. However, the integration of these activities often falls back due to methodology wilderness, lack of vision, or organizational misalignment. To effectively improve IT and software development, first of all, the current situation and status must be understood. Based on this situation analysis, gaps are identified and compared to economic goals, benchmarks and process frameworks. Then an improvement program is started to close these gaps. Despite an increasing body of knowledge with improvement frameworks such as Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) or Six Sigma, many organizations still struggle in practice. This chapter goes beyond such method frameworks and looks to setting improvement objectives. Objective-driven process improvement (ODPI) underlines the need to start with clear business objectives. From those, a specific and tailored approach towards achieving engineering excellence is derived. The E4-measurement (Establish, Extract, Evaluate, Execute) process is applied to instrument and drive ODPI and show how to measure throughout an improvement project. Improving productivity and efficiency is selected as a hands-on example of how to practically implement ODPI.
