Custom Process Appraisal

An appraisal is an objective and practical method for evaluating and improving your organization’s engineering, management, and service delivery practices. An appraisal obtains consensus on the strengths and opportunities for improvement. These findings become the basis of an action plan that everyone can support.

An appraisal can also, if desired, be used to provide an objective benchmark against pre-defined practices, such as your own internal processes, Agile/Scrum, ISO, PMBOK, or some other framework.

Appraisals can take between two and ten days based on the size of the organization, the number of locations, and projects in scope. A typical appraisal will consist of one day planning and scoping, two days of artifact review, and five days onsite to conduct interviews and provide a final briefing.

Everyone has his or her own ideas of how the organization can be improved. Because of this, there can be disagreement about how to proceed, and this in itself hinders progress. An appraisal provides focus on the strengths and opportunities to improve.

The Process Group appraisals have the following features:

• Each appraisal is scoped to meet the needs of the organization.
• An appraisal team is formed. The team is composed of 3-5 members selected from the client organization along with a lead from The Process Group.
• The Process Group provides briefings on the appraisal approach to the appraisal team and participants.
• Senior management is involved in the appraisal process to ensure buy-in of the results.
• Interviews are conducted with managers, practitioners, QA and project/team leaders of the organization to understand what works well and what does not. Interviews provide context, insight, and lead to the buy-in of the results.
• The findings of the appraisal are developed during the appraisal period.
• The findings are mapped to the business goals of the organization. This helps ensure that improvement priorities are aligned with business needs.
• The final appraisal results are presented to the management team and appraisal participants on the last day of the appraisal.
• An additional one or two days can be added to develop an action plan.

After an appraisal, you will have:

• An organization-wide consensus on the strengths and opportunities for improvement.
• The foundation for a tailored improvement plan designed to raise the level of your organization’s performance.

THE PROCESS GROUP

The Process Group principals have performed over 400 appraisals since 1989. Their appraisals have included a wide variety of industries, such as telecommunications, real-time embedded devices, services (sales, accounting), information systems, defense systems, gaming apps, hardware development, and web/mobile applications.

Contact us to discuss your needs.