Process Improvement Measures

Do you have any suggestions for a size and quality measure for a Process Improvement organization?

There are other questions that need to be answered first in order to provide a proper response to your question. What does your Process Improvement process say? Examine your process to see what type of activities you have documented, where are the spots in the process you can collect data, and what data you can collect. You also have to consider your business goals and objectives for your Process Improvement organization. Then you will have some idea of the measures you can use for size and quality of your Process Improvement effort. Experts can offer you all different ideas, but if these ideas don’t support your goals and/or your process is written in such a way that it doesn’t support these measures, then you will have to consider something else.

Computing a Process-Compliance Index

I am interested in building a dashboard tool for measuring compliance to the CMMI process areas for specific projects. Would you have any insight on how a process-compliance index could be computed?

What immediately comes to mind is the scoring system for a Class B appraisal. For each practice Green is Satisfied, Yellow is Partially Satisfied, and Red in Unsatisfied. You can then use these colors for your dashboard and chart the movement from red to yellow to green.

What Does GP 2.8 Monitor and Control the Process Mean?

In my experience as a Lead Appraiser I find that most organizations struggle with understanding the intent of this Generic Practice. I believe that part of the confusion with this practice is that people may read the practice title instead of the practice.

"Monitor and control the process against the plan for performing the process and take appropriate corrective action."

The intent of GP 2.8 is not just to monitor and control process, as indicated by the title, but to directly monitor and control the process against the plan for the process (GP 2.2) as you PERFORM the process. Many organizations think that by checking some process measures on a monthly or quarterly basis, after the fact, is meeting the intent of GP 2.8. The frequency of monitoring and controlling the process depends on how often you perform the process. Some process occur weekly and others may be only once or twice during the project's lifecycle. So, once again, the monitoring and controlling of the process must occur as you execute the process. Keeping in mind that reporting the results of the monitoring and controlling effort can happen on a monthly or quarterly basis.
The other misconception about GP 2.8 is that you can read the practice and interpret the words to mean that you can monitor and control the process without using data. That is true if you just read the words of the practice title. However, the practice states that the monitoring and controlling of the process is based on the plan for performing the process. Once you are using a "baseline" for comparison, then the implication is that you have some means for measuring and determining if there is a need for taking appropriate corrective action. In fact, the GP 2.8 discussion in the CMMI refers to the Measurement and Analysis (MA) Process Area for more information about measurements. So the intent of GP 2.8 is to use MA to define one or more appropriate process measures and indicators that will be used to measure the process' performance against its plan, as the process is being executed. The GP 2.8 sub-practices communicate the intent of this Generic Practice. Taking corrective action should not be because an arbitrary threshold was exceeded, but instead the criteria for taking corrective action should be when the process requirements and/or objectives are not being met, process issues have been identified, or when process progress deviates significantly from the plan for the process.