Managing and Organizing Concurrent Processes According to the CMM Levels

Research for reduced lead time and cost in concurrent process development (CPD) becomes crucial in new work organizations. Today, the concurrent processes involve more and more activities and work groups which must be efficiently coordinated. In this article, the authors propose a framework for structuring concurrent activities in order to improve the global performance (lead time, workload, risks, etc.). Many research works aim at proposing methods for management and control of concurrent development activities, but these methods are often ‘isolated’ and specific to an activity. There is no global solution that covers the entire development process and the set of related management and organizational activities. In this article, the authors used the SEI’s (Software Engineering Institute) CMM (Capability Maturity Model) as a guideline to define an approach for the management and the control of a set of concurrent development activities. According to the CMM levels, the proposed approach is decomposed into four improvement steps that direct the organization’s focus to manage its organizational development process. The first step applies basic project management methods to decompose and to schedule a process into several work groups. The second step addresses activities such as controlling the size of the obtained work groups, and characterizing each actor in a group. In the third step, a model based on the work transformation matrix (WTM) is proposed for the performance estimation of an organization. The last level aims at continually optimizing the organizational processes. For this purpose, models for sequential and parallel execution of processes are proposed and compared.