Management Practices for Software Excellence: An Empirical Investigation

The notion of “Software Excellence”, i.e., excellence in all aspects of the creation and application of software in the general organizational context, has been modeled in this paper after the European Quality Model. The logic of the model is that in any Software Producing Unit (SPU), Leadership driving Policy & Strategy, SPU People Management, End-user Management, Resource Management and Processes contributes towards Software Excellence, which in turn results in enhanced End-user Satisfaction, SPU People Satisfaction, a positive Impact on the Organization and effective Business Results for the organization. A survey using the Software Excellence model was conducted by the European Software Institute (ESI) in collaboration with INSEAD. This paper reports on the results of the survey with a specific focus on the competitive priorities and key management practices within organizations obtaining the highest scores of Software Excellence. Introduction Several software maturity models such as the CMM [8,11], BOOTSTRAP [9] and SPICE [12], have been proposed with the aim of assessing and improving the maturity of software development processes which are often notoriously immature [6]. If experience in the application of Total Quality Models (TQM) [10] models is to be taken as a guide, a narrow focus on improving the maturity of software processes alone will not deliver the required organizational value. The continuing quest for business value has been a major driver in the expansion of the scope of TQM models from narrow “product quality control” issues to a wider “quality of management” perspective. In collaboration with the European Software Institute, we have proposed a model of Software Excellence (SE) which integrates the strengths of software maturity and TQM models. Our model defines the degree to which an organization is succeeding in both creating the enabling conditions for developing and obtaining results from applying software to create value for key stakeholders. The SE model has been used as the basis of a survey of European organizations conducted in late 1995. Reference [5] describes a quantitative analysis of the results of the survey * Author names are listed in alphabetical order. Both authors contributed equally to the paper.