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Last Updated on Friday, 10 September 2010 10:30 Written by Harry Julsing

IT quality in its many forms, such as CMMi, ISO/IEC 9126, ITIL, etc. are generally accepted as a means to deliver better solutions to internal and external customers. In this context better basically means: "with the highest possible chance of success". All these quality improvement initiatives are means to avoid the risk that anything could go wrong.

Business unit managers however just want solutions that work. How these working solutions are accomplished they don't really care. They want it good, cheap and they want it now. They want a product, which will help them reach their goals, whether this is higher sales or a more efficient organization leading to cost reduction.

Quality improvement costs money, and in some cases lots of money, as a result the immediate cost of IT solutions increases.

Quality often adds at least one layer of bureaucracy, extra checkpoints, more paperwork, more people. Thus more time is spent on making decisions. As a result projects take more time.

This is the short term vision on quality. In the long run however, you should be able to reap the benefits of improved quality. The arguments you hear are, shorter time-to-market, less rework, less maintenance, flexible to deal with change, all leading to lower cost and smaller future projects.

These supplier and customer objectives seem to be contradicting to each other, creating friction in an organization. This contradiction is mainly about timing. The business wants a solution now and IT is trying to sell them a long term solution. Strangely enough in the long run both parties actually want the same.

The problem is that IT has been doing that for many years now. Is it that IT is not able to get their house in order or is it that IT is evolving and continuing to evolve so rapidly that by the time they got one thing fixed, something else is broken?

We are in an era where technology and the way engineers develop products are reinventing themselves every cycle. These cycles initially took hundreds of years or longer, but nowadays can take a year, three months or even less. The moment you walk out of the store with your new laptop or cell phone, it is already outdated. This will not stop, which means that IT organizations will be under a continuous pressure to improve themselves.

How should IT sell this to the business? Should we continue to do the same thing over and over again? Does the answer lie in a different financing or business structure, such as outsourcing, slow down innovation and allow technical dept to creep in? We have a tendency to approach these issues using empirical data; by looking to the past, while the answer probably lies in the future.

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CMMi

Adopting a process improvement initiative can be like navigating a minefield. Good preparation for your journey will smooth the path to success. Starting with a training program will give you a road map to navigate through CMMi-based process improvement initiatives successfully. In this training program, everyone involved in the development process will develop a shared understanding of CMMi, as well as the consequences for their organization of implementing and applying CMMi.

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