May 1999 Continuous process improvement is based on many small, evolutionary steps rather than revolutionary innovations. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) provides a framework for organizing these evolutionary steps into five maturity levels that lay successive foundations for continuous process improvement. These five maturity levels define an ordinal scale for measuring the maturity of an ...

Pressures for more complex products, customer dissatisfaction and problems related to cost and schedule overruns increase the need for effective management response and for improvement of software development practices. In this context, cultural aspects can influence and interfere in a successful implementation of a software process improvement program. This paper explores cultural issues, disc...

The focus of this paper is to outline the experience of a European based software organization utilizing the IDEAL model, while implementing a tailored Capability Maturity Model (CMM) software process improvement program. The goal was to achieve process improvement rather than a specific CMM maturity level. In doing this, the IDEAL model was extensively researched and employed. The benefits and...

Environmental management implementation is presently one of the ways of organization success and value improvement. Increasing an organization motivation to environmental measures introduction is caused primarily by the rising pressure of the society that generates various incentives to endeavor for the environmental performance improvement. The aim of the paper is to identify and characterize ...

Artifi cial insemination (AI) technology is the most effective tool for genetic improvement in cattle. The AI service began in the 1960’s and the number of annual cattle AI’s has been steadily increasing up to 1990, after which it gradually dropped for about a decade. Since 2001 however there has been a modest recovery in the number of AI cases. In 2009 AI coverage stood at 4.2%. To rapidly imp...

Software process improvement (SPI) is challenging, particularly for small and medium sized enterprises. Most existing SPI frameworks are either too expensive to deploy, or do not take an organizations’ specific needs into consideration. There is a need for light weight SPI frameworks that enable practitioners to base improvement efforts on the issues that are the most critical for the specific ...

BACKGROUND This study is part of an interactive improvement intervention aimed to facilitate empowerment-based chronic kidney care using data from persons with CKD and their family members. There are many challenges to implementing empowerment-based care, and it is therefore necessary to study the implementation process. The aim of this study was to generate knowledge regarding the implementati...