subject: Business Process Management For Effective Software Developments [print this page] Wise use of business process management software solutions by the software developers enable businesses to stay ahead of the competition. Streamlined, efficient and well-managed business processes improve business performance, increase revenue and assure customer satisfaction.
Business Process Management
Business process management (BPM) is a systematic approach to making an organization's workflow more effective, more efficient and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment. BPM is often in conjunction with Six Sigma and Lean initiatives.
Successful businesses must manage their business processes, workflow, and business intelligence to drive productivity and maintain a competitive edge. The processes are described in terms of what is being done without regard to who or how in a solution-free, action-verb form. BPM is a powerful guide for the identification and prioritization of improvement opportunities in software companies.
Software Development Processes
The software development in India can be classified into two groups namely:
1. Lifecycle processes (analogous to core business processes)
2. Cross-lifecycle processes (analogous to supporting business processes).
Primary lifecycle processes
These include:
Discovering requirements.
Designing solutions.
Constructing solutions.
Validating solutions.
Implementing (or deploying) solutions.
Supporting deployed solutions (including defect repairs, minor enhancements, changes dictated by evolution of underlying technologies).
Primary cross-lifecycle processes
These include:
Planning of projects.
Estimation of effort, duration and delivered quality.
Tracking and reporting status.
Defining processes and standards.
Measuring and monitoring process performance.
Training.
Controlling versions and releases of software work products (configuration management).
Software Development (India) Process Measures
Following metrics characterize the performance of all software processes:
Cycle time (calendar duration).
Defect rate.
Effort (person-days or hours).
Size (e.g., function points, lines of code or any other suitable proxy measure).
Capability Measure of the efficiency of a software process, e.g., Putnams Productivity Index (Five Core Metrics by Lawrence H. Putnam and Ware Myers).
Schedule pressure The schedule itself has been shown to be a significant X when estimating effort and the schedule required for processing a given size through a process with a given capability.
Software development (India) has a set of measures that answers three questions for each process:
How long does it take (with respect to size)? i.e., cycle time, throughput.
What does it cost (with respect to size)? i.e., required effort, efficiency.
How good are the products?
The compound measures that qualify conclusions in relation to factors known to be influential are required for answering these questions. The following table illustrates contents of a dashboard that briefly provides answers to the above questions.
Enterprise information should be organized and managed efficiently. Business process management solutions help organize and manage your business information.
While there are potentially additional measures that may be of interest, any organization that has all of these is certain to be the most successful in future.
