Service Description
Progress Reviews
One of the major challenges in implementing process improvements is maintaining momentum and keeping the effort on track. Conducting Progress Reviews is a key strategy for ensuring that an organization's process improvement program is healthy, productive, and properly focused. A Progress Review provides the information management needs to adequately guide process improvement.
Why are Progress Reviews important?
A process improvement program may fail to meet its goals when the commitment to improvement is not regularly and visibly reinforced. Schedules begin to slip under the routine pressures of development projects and the sense of urgency that is crucial for process improvement begins to erode. However, the critical need to improve quality and productivity makes it essential that the organization ensure that its improvement efforts do not falter.
Process change is never easy or painless, but organizations that conduct Progress Reviews can expect a less painful and a more productive transition toward the next level of process maturity.
What's involved in a Progress Review?
Our structured Progress Review methodology emphasizes participation by those involved in developing and adopting new processes. Review activities typically include:
- measuring progress against plan,
- identifying and discussing process design and implementation issues,
- formulating recommendations for corrective actions, as necessary, and
- presenting review results to management or to a quality/process steering committee.
Depending on the size of the organization, the Progress Reviews can occur quarterly (for small organizations) to monthly (for large ones). The frequency depends not only on the size of the organization, but also on how aggressive the process improvement effort is.