A Process Management Process Area at Maturity Level 5

The purpose of Organizational Innovation and Deployment (OID) is to select and deploy incremental and innovative improvements that measurably improve the organization’s processes and technologies. These improvements support the organization’s quality and process-performance objectives as derived from the organization’s business objectives.

The Organizational Innovation and Deployment process area enables the selection and deployment of improvements that can enhance the organization’s ability to meet its quality and process-performance objectives. (See the definition of “quality and process-performance objectives” in the glossary.)

The term improvement, as used in this process area, refers to all ideas (proven and unproven) that would change the organization’s processes and technologies to better meet the organization’s quality and process-performance objectives.

Quality and process-performance objectives that this process area might address include the following:

·         Improved product quality (e.g., functionality, performance)

·         Increased productivity

·         Decreased cycle time

·         Greater customer and end-user satisfaction

·         Shorter development or production time to change functionality, add new features, or adapt to new technologies

·         Reduce delivery time

·         Reduce time to adapt to new technologies and business needs

·         Improved performance of a supply-chain involving multiple suppliers

·         Improved inter-supplier performance

·         Improved utilization of resources across the organization

Achievement of these objectives depends on the successful establishment of an infrastructure that enables and encourages all people in the organization to propose potential improvements to the organization’s processes and technologies. Achievement of these objectives also depends on being able to effectively evaluate and deploy proposed improvements to the organization’s processes and technologies. All members of the organization can participate in the organization’s process- and technology-improvement activities. Their proposals are systematically gathered and addressed.

Improvements may be identified and executed by the acquirer or the supplier. The acquirer encourages all suppliers to participate in the acquirer’s process- and technology-improvement activities. Some selected improvements may be deployed across acquirer and supplier organizations.

The acquirer and suppliers may share the costs and benefits of improvements. Acquirers may increase the incentive for suppliers to participate in improvement efforts across the supply chain by allowing suppliers to appropriate the entire value derived from a contributed improvement for an initial period (e.g., 6 to 18 months). Over time, the supplier may be expected to share a proportion of those savings with the acquirer (e.g., through cost reductions to the acquirer). Acquirer and supplier expectations related to participation in process- and technology-improvement activities, and the sharing of associated costs and benefits, should be documented in the supplier agreement.

Pilots are conducted to evaluate significant changes involving untried, high-risk, or innovative improvements before they are broadly deployed.

Process and technology improvements to be deployed across the organization are selected from process- and technology-improvement proposals based on the following criteria:

·         A quantitative understanding of the organization’s current quality and process performance

·         The organization’s quality and process-performance objectives

·         Estimates of the improvement in quality and process performance resulting from deploying the process and technology improvements

·         Estimated costs of deploying process and technology improvements, and resources and funding available for such deployment

Expected benefits added by the process and technology improvements are weighed against the cost and impact to the organization. Change and stability must be balanced carefully. Change that is too great or too rapid can overwhelm the organization, destroying its investment in organizational learning represented by organizational process assets. Rigid stability can result in stagnation, allowing the changing business environment to erode the organization’s business position.

Improvements are deployed, as appropriate, to new and ongoing projects.

In this process area, the term process and technology improvements refers to incremental and innovative improvements to processes and also to process or product technologies (including project work environments).

The informative material in this process area is written assuming the specific practices are applied in an organization that has a quantitative understanding of its standard processes and their expected quality and performance in predictable situations. Specific practices of this process area may be applicable, but with reduced value, if this assumption is not met.

The specific practices in this process area complement and extend those found in the Organizational Process Focus process area. The focus of this process area is process improvement based on a quantitative understanding of the organization’s set of standard processes and technologies and their expected quality and performance in predictable situations. In the Organizational Process Focus process area, no assumptions are made about the quantitative basis of improvement.

Refer to the Organizational Process Focus process area for more information about soliciting, collecting, and handling process improvement proposals and coordinating the deployment of process improvements into projects’ defined processes.

Refer to the Organizational Training process area for more information about providing updated training to support the deployment of process and technology improvements.

Refer to the Organizational Process Performance process area for more information about quality and process-performance objectives and process-performance models. Quality and process-performance objectives are used to analyze and select process- and technology-improvement proposals for deployment. Process-performance models are used to quantify the impact and benefits of innovations.

Refer to the Measurement and Analysis process area for more information about establishing objectives for measurement and analysis, specifying measures and analyses to be performed, obtaining and analyzing measures, and reporting results.

Refer to the Integrated Project Management process area for more information about implementing process and technology improvements into the project’s defined process and project work environment.

Refer to the Decision Analysis and Resolution process area for more information about formal evaluations when selecting improvement proposals and innovations.

Specific Goal and Practice Summary

SG 1 Select Improvements

SP 1.1       Collect and Analyze Improvement Proposals

SP 1.2       Identify and Analyze Innovations

SP 1.3       Pilot Improvements

SP 1.4       Select Improvements for Deployment

SG 2 Deploy Improvements

SP 2.1       Plan the Deployment

SP 2.2       Manage the Deployment

SP 2.3       Measure Improvement Effects