Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
planning, and controlling changes in the applied processes for process
improvements or solving problems that have surfaced.
•
The
Librarian
runs the Experience Base. S/he is responsible for entering data into
the repository, and usually reports to the Experience Manager.
Furthermore, responsibilities for process learning activities are assigned to
organization members outside the EF team that create synergies for those
organizational members. This also lowers the need for dedicated resources and creates
acceptance for the process learning activities.
3.4
Experimental Evaluation of indiGo
The methodology and tools developed for indiGo will be evaluated through a case
study, which will be performed at Fraunhofer IESE starting in April 2002. First
results should be available at the end of 2002. The organizational framework of the
evaluation of the indiGo approach is as follows.
IESE's approximately 100 regular staff do applied research, evaluation and transfer
of software engineering methods and techniques in a broad range of industrial and
publicly funded projects. IESE's knowledge management is performed by the CoIN-
Team (CoIN = Corporate Information Network) with five part-time members. They
maintain a process model database (CoIN-IQ) and a database of lessons learned from
current and completed projects (CoIN-EF). The process models are partitioned into
subject areas, for instance project-related matters are distinguished from cooperation
with universities, and persons concerned with the subjects in the organization are
selected as owners of the respective process models. Lessons learned from the
projects are elicited by the CoIN-team, which also provides the Process Engineer.
The process models concerned with project management need to be adapted to a
recent restructuring of IESE. As projects are the core business of IESE, the new
process models are central for the organization and affect most of the staff. It is vital
that they accept and “live” the new process models and cooperate to continuously
improving them. Due to the variety of the projects, the processes can reasonably be
captured at an abstract level only. That means, the instantiation of the abstract process
models is highly knowledge-intensive.
In a series of workshops, which involved the higher management, an initial
revision of the process descriptions was elaborated. Through regular informal contacts
it was assured that the higher management would support the introduction of the new
processes. Process models with a high potential of conflicts will be introduced in
April 2002 according to the indiGo methodology.
The process of creating project offers is planned to be introduced in two phases: A
discussion phase and a pilot phase. In the discussion phase members of the
organization discuss the process description without actually instantiating it. This will
elicit not only suggestions on the process descriptions, but related stories or examples
from their daily work. A member of the CoIN-team or an independent moderator will
facilitate the discussion. The author of the process description will point out topics to
lead the discussion in a goal-oriented way. The participants are asked to indicate the
type of their contributions by using a set of labels that were specially designed for the
