Adaptive Process Improvement

Over the past twenty years, companies have made significant progress toward understanding how to measure, consistently and quantitatively their development processes.
By performing a process assessment organizations have been able to identify the current status of their development practices and to identify potential areas for improvements upon which decisions can be taken and implemented.

As a result, our experience of implementing Process Improvement has grown.
The question is - what has been learned and what are the essential ingredients for success?
Capability and maturity models have helped to identify which processes to improve, but how do we determine how and the best way to implement the identified process improvements?
How do we appraise the ability and readiness to initiate improvements?

Adaptive process improvement is a new approach to process improvement.
It is style of organizational process improvement that focuses on adapting learning from prior successes as the basis for developing and optimizing future strategies and successes.
An organization that employs adaptive process improvement will make incremental improvements to processes in response to the changing business environment.

As part of improvement, an organization needs to choose a change strategy that is appropriate to the way of organizational working.
Experience shows that different types of improvement work require different methods for organizing improvements.

There are more than ten prominent organizational change approaches that can be used in a particular organizational setting to improve the success of its change efforts.

Alec Dorling
  is the international convener of ISO/IEC 15504 (SPICE).
He is an internationally recognized expert in the field of software standardization, quality management, process assessment and certification.
He has held key positions in software engineering in Europe at the National Computing Centre (UK), the European Software Institute (Spain) and the Centre for Software Engineering (Sweden).