Section 12.3.  When Should Post-Assessment Planning Begin? How Ambitious Should It Be?

12.3. When Should Post-Assessment Planning Begin? How Ambitious Should It Be? The organization wants to improve as soon as possible. However, it is important to establish what needs to be done first and in what sequence to do the rest. After an assessment, things can still go seriously wrong. Going too slow or too fast are equally dangerous. Taking more than a month or two to develop a realistic action plan means allowing everyday events to take over again and putting improvement on the back burner indefinitely. On the other hand, trying to take on too much improvement all at once can paralyze an organization. Process improvement should be managed like any other project. Plans need to be made and resources allocated. Progress needs to be measured and monitored. A typical post-assessment plan is described in Section 12.4. It includes a statement of the organization's business goals, a list of processes and projects that have the greatest impact on those goals, and a statement of the real long-term goal of all software process improvement, including a scheme to reduce defects at every stage of the development cycle. A post-assessment plan cannot change an organization overnight. It should target those projects that are most important for the short- and long-term health of the organization. Some may be prototype projects for the changing direction of the business. Others may be critical projects for the current health of the organization. Still others might be projects that are about to go into the manufacturing phase. 12.3.1. What Should the Duration Be of a Post-Assessment Plan? Medium Term A realistic goal for a post-assessment improvement plan is to organize a way to alter individual processes on critical projects so that at a minimum, after one year, half of the relevant criteria for KPAs/PAs at a given maturity level will have been satisfied, and within two years, all of them will have been satisfied. Some organizations have found that if senior management leads the post-assessment improvement, the time needed for significant improvement can be substantially reduced. Long Term A one-year improvement plan, however, will not turn a company around. To do that, companies should schedule a regular plan of yearly follow-up assessments to transform the improvement process from a pressurized one-time affair to a gradual, evolving, quantified effort. Yearly assessments measure and encourage gradual improvement and can prevent an all too typical pattern of sudden bursts of effort followed by apathy and half-improved programs that are left to wither on the vine.