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Every IT organization practices some form of software management, whether ad hoc and mostly manual, or well-defined and highly-automated. Most organizations operate somewhere in the middle of this range. So the case you'll be making isn't really to have your IT organization adopt software management. Rather, you'll be making the case to improve your organization's software management practices in some concrete way.
For example, if your organization's current practices are mostly ad hoc, even chaotic at times, you may be making the case for putting basic change management (CM) and quality assurance (QA) in place. If, on the other hand, you already have well-functioning CM and QA, you may see the next step as improved project scheduling, requirements tracking, or some other aspect of software management.
To begin, be sure you have a concise, up-to-date description of your organization's current software management practices. If there is none, or it's incomplete or outdated, take some time (no more than a few hours should be necessary) to summarize the practices and tools you use in the following core software management areas:
1. Requirements tracking and assessment
2. Product and project planning
3. Estimation and scheduling
4. Tracking time and resources consumed and artifacts (deliverables) produced
5. Software development
6. Application deployment
7. Quality measurement and assurance
8. Problem identification and resolution.
IDENTIFY KEY PROBLEMS THAT NEED ADDRESSING
After you establish what your current practices are, assess where you currently have serious problems in consistency, function, quality, timeliness, cost, or service. If you already have a QA process in place, it should provide a good idea of problems that exist. In any case, don't neglect to check with end users, developers, support staff, and customers to learn about other problems and potential improvements. Project tracking data (if you have it) can help identify excessive or volatile development schedules or budgets.
Figure 1 (below) provides a list of questions that can help you assess problems your organization may currently be experiencing.
Once you've identified a list of problems, rank them by the magnitude of their impact or by how serious you think your organization's management considers the problems. Take into consideration each problem's potential impact on the entire enterprise, not just on the IT department. This ranked list will assist you in two ways: helping you to decide which software management improvements to propose and guiding how you construct the case for why these improvements will benefit the organization.
KNOW WHERE YOU'RE HEADED
Now you're ready to decide which improvements you want to make. If your organization has very few defined software management practices, not even CM or QA, the most likely improvements you need to make first are:
1. Create a basic ?Acme, Inc. ? Software Management? document with sections for each of the ten areas noted above. In this document, begin to define the basic process to be followed for each area. (Software Development Survival Guide describes how to create this document.)
2. Adopt a change management process and tools.
3. Adopt a quality assurance process and tools.
The first step addresses the obvious need for a description of the processes you're hoping to improve. The next two steps, adopting CM and QA, are essential to almost every part of software management. CM provides secure storage, use, and deployment of application artifacts. QA provides the framework for knowing how your other practices affect application and service quality.
If you've already incorporated CM and QA into your organization, I suggest you adopt an incremental and iterative software development process as your next step. An incremental strategy identifies concrete deliverables that are smaller than the whole work product from any development phase. For example, you can identify a series of application releases with additional functions added to each successive release.
Repetitive, cyclic work on different project phases make a process iterative. An iteration can produce a new increment or just rework an increment. Among other benefits, iterations allow for more end user involvement as a project progresses. An incremental and iterative approach reduces risk, builds confidence and credibility among developers and end users, and allows you to improve your process as a project progresses.
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