Organizational Problems Faced

This group analyses the problems related to all the improvement items, investigates the best results available in literature and tries to adapt them to the company context, keeping into account the problems to be faced day by day by the people involved in the projects activities, due to the organization, the products domain and the type of the clients.
The existence of this Area played a fundamental role in the achievement of the main company-level results, as assessment of levels 2 and 3 of CMM and the ISO certification.

Nevertheless, the organizational approach to the software process improvement has been tuned and changed during the first 5 years of the company life.
The Methodologies Area staff in fact, having the objective of investigating in deep the various topics gained a good level of knowledge about the theoretic aspects of the faced arguments; however the problems connected to the practical application of the methodologies and processes in a particular context and products domain are sometimes not immediately visible, and the contribution of the experience coming from the members of software development projects is invaluable.

Furthermore Sodalia experience showed that members of the projects, if not involved in various decisions at company level, could suffer the technical decisions like impositions; as a consequence the methodologies risk to be "placed on the shelf".

But, at the same time, project staff feel the involvement in methodologies and processes definition as a lower level priority activity; in addition, the Methodologies Area has the commitment to guide the company improvement according to CMM as a reference model.

For these reasons an organizational approach calibrating the contribution of theoretical elements and practical experience has been considered necessary for guarantee the success of the company improvement steps.

		Organizational problems faced
Improvement Steps				The Organization of the Software Engineering Process Group