Improving Cost Of Quality through benchmarking exercise

Benchmarking is a must to achieve higher goals and productivity. This process not only helps in achieving better results, it also sets higher achievable standards. Benchmarking has been used quite effectively in all the industries. In Manufacturing industries it is easy to have quantifiable goals that can be used to benchmark the process. The nature of manufacturing industry being such that the process of benchmarking can be drilled down to the last component level of tracking. For example based on the over all benchmarking of annual productivity, we can decide the daily figure of production for each component/part for a month or even a week. This kind of benchmarking, however, will not be possible in Service industry. In Service industry, the nature of job is more of a qualitative nature and the response to the requested service becomes a factor for benchmarking. Hence the parameters for Service industry benchmarking is different from Manufacturing industry. Software industry is more of a service oriented industry, where requests from customers are serviced by way of developing software. The software developed for a customer will definitely vary from the software developed for another customer as customization is done for each customer. Such being the nature of software industry, there has not been any quantitative approach to benchmark the industry standards. This paper attempts to study the characteristics of Software Industry in an attempt to standardize some of the features across various software projects and then benchmark one of its measurable parameter – Cost Of Quality. Software organizations are mainly concerned about their development process (productivity, defects, etc.) and this is therefore the thrust of any benchmarking. There are many organizations that offer benchmarking services, where project data can be submitted to get back information of where the project fits with respect to other “similar” projects for which data is available in the database of the service provider. The tricky aspect is “what is similar” and whether the database with the service provider has a sufficient number of projects to give a proper “industry wide” feel of the organization’s competitive position.