Alessia BILLI, An Experience of SEPG Organisation : Organisation of the software engineering process group

The Organization of the Software Engineering Process Group

To fulfill this need of the Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG in the following) has been established in July 1996.

* The Group is composed as permanent members by the Methodologies Area representatives and by the project managers of all the company projects. In addition, according to the particular needs, other company staffs are involved in SEPG activities for short periods.
* The selected approach is based on the selection of improvement areas, with clear objectives, and on the implementation of related actions by the establishment of work groups.
* This implementation is followed by the extension of the achieved results in the overall organization.
* This approach includes points of centralization of both information and decisions, and points of delegation of the activities to specialized groups, optimizing in such a way the effort expended by all the participants according to their role and capabilities.
* The improvement areas are identified by the SEPG, on the basis of proposals suggested by either Methodologies Area staff or projects members; generally the proposals arise from assessments, from analysis of industry trends and emerging technologies or from project needs.
* The work groups having the objective of implementing these areas are composed trying to involve people capable of give the maximum contribution: Methodologies Area staff with a strong theoretic knowledge and practitioners with technical responsibilities for certain domains within a development project and with a significant experience.
Methodologies Area staff are in charge for organizing and coordinating the work of these groups, and collecting, synthesizing and reporting the results.

The responsibilities of the work group consist of the following:

focus on an aspect of the software process;
proposal of improvement actions, defining the objectives and the expected benefits;
implementation of the improvement actions, as assigned by the SEPG;
support to projects.

The sharing of the information on the SEPG activities is also facilitated by the support of the available tools as the Software Process Database and the use of the internal web as a communication mean.

		The Organization of the Software Engineering Process Group
Organizational problems faced				Benefits of this approach