ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the motivations for process improvement, the factors that make improvement difficult, and the conditions and activities that help enable improvement. It considers the need to conduct appraisals against multiple frameworks and the need to efficiently collect the objective evidence required by each standard and appraisal method. The book shows how to implement, manage, and sustain process improvement, guided by an integrated application of the appropriate standards. It presents how the objective evidence needed to measure conformance to multiple standards may be efficiently created and organized. The book examines the multiple relationships among the standards at a detailed requirement level. In general, these relationships, or maps, are “many-to-many,” meaning that a requirement in one standard may correspond to more than one requirement in another standard, and vice versa.
