Benchmarking business processes in software production: a case study

Organisations constantly seek improvement of organisational practices or market positions by implementing improvement programs and quality initiatives such as ISO certification. An improvement project is any project that aims to make a business process more efficient, flexible, reliable or responsive; or raise the quality of working life. We note that few organisations make the effort to evaluate the effectiveness of such improvement programmes, explore why this might be so, and describe some of the benefits of undertaking evaluation activities. We present a methodology for selecting Key Process Indicators most appropriate to selected business processes and assessing an improvement program, and describe the methodology's implementation in a small Australian software company. We stress that measurement of performance before and after ostensible improvements is needed for objective assessment of change processes.