Process Improvement and the Corporate Balance Sheet

  • Authors:

  • Raymond Dion

  • Affiliations:

  • -

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Software
  • Year:
  • 1993

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.04

Visualization

Abstract

The Software Engineering Initiative, process-improvement program undertaken by the Software Systems Laboratory in Raytheon's equipment division in mid-1988 is reviewed. The three phases of the program are the process-stabilization phase, in which the emphasis is on distilling the elements of the process actually being used and progressively institutionalizing it across all projects, the process-control phase, in which emphasis shifts to instrumenting projects to gather significant data and analyze the data to understand how to control the process, and the process-change phase, in which the emphasis is on determining how to adjust the process as a result of measurement analysis and how to diffuse the new methods among practitioners. It is shown that the process-improvement initiative has improved the equipment division's bottom line, increased productivity, and changed the corporate culture. Much of the savings came from reducing rework