A Process Management Process Area at Maturity Level 4

The purpose of Organizational Process Performance (OPP) is to establish and maintain a quantitative understanding of the performance of the organization’s set of standard processes in support of achieving quality and process-performance objectives, and to provide process-performance data, baselines, and models to quantitatively manage the organization’s projects.

Process performance is a measure of actual results achieved by following a process. Process performance is characterized by process measures (e.g., effort, cycle time, and defect removal effectiveness) and product measures (e.g., reliability, defect density, capacity, response time, and cost).

The common measures for the organization consist of process and product measures that can be used to characterize the actual performance of processes in the organization’s individual projects. By analyzing the resulting measurements, a distribution or range of results can be established that characterize the expected performance of the process when used on any individual project.

In this process area, the phrase quality and process-performance objectives covers objectives and requirements for product quality, service quality, and process performance. As indicated above, the term process performance includes quality; however, to emphasize the importance of quality, the phrase quality and process-performance objectives is used rather than just process-performance objectives.

Measuring quality and process performance may involve combining existing measures into additional derived measures to provide more insight into the overall efficiencies and effectiveness at a project or organization level. The analysis at the organization level may be used to study productivity, improve efficiencies, and increase throughput across projects in the organization.

The expected process performance can be used in establishing the project’s quality and process-performance objectives and can be used as a baseline against which actual project performance can be compared. This information is used to quantitatively manage the project. Each quantitatively managed project, in turn, provides actual performance results that become a part of baseline data for organizational process assets.

The acquirer may use quality and process-performance objectives to define performance and service level expectations for suppliers.

Process-performance models are used to represent past and current process performance and to predict future results of the process. For example, the latent defects in the delivered product can be predicted using measurements of defects identified during product verification activities.

The same measures of latent defects, analyzed using a supplier’s past projects data, can be used to predict the quality of products delivered by that supplier. The acquirer can use supplier process-performance models to predict the overall capability of the acquirer to deliver the product.

When the organization has measures, data, and analytical techniques for critical process, product, and service characteristics, it is able to do the following:

·         Determine whether processes are behaving consistently or have stable trends (i.e., are predictable)

·         Identify processes in which performance is within natural bounds that are consistent across process implementation teams

·         Establish criteria for identifying whether a process or subprocess should be statistically managed, and determine pertinent measures and analytical techniques to be used in such management

·         Identify processes that show unusual (e.g., sporadic or unpredictable) behavior

·         Identify aspects of processes that can be improved in the organization’s set of standard processes

·         Identify the implementation of a process that performs best

·         Identify aspects of processes that could be improved across acquirer-supplier interfaces

Refer to the Quantitative Project Management process area for more information about the use of process-performance baselines and models.

Refer to the Measurement and Analysis process area for more information about specifying measures and collecting and analyzing data.

Refer to the Organizational Process Definition process area for more information about establishing organizational process assets.

Specific Goal and Practice Summary

SG 1 Establish Performance Baselines and Models

SP 1.1       Select Processes

SP 1.2       Establish Process-Performance Measures

SP 1.3       Establish Quality and Process-Performance Objectives

SP 1.4       Establish Process-Performance Baselines

SP 1.5       Establish Process-Performance Models