Software Process Improvement Laboratory

Many companies that achieve ISO 9001 certification discover that the perceived benefits are often elusive and hard to achieve.

This course seeks to provide guidance and insight for those companies that experience the familiar 'plateau' effect of process management. They are doing all the right things according to the requirements of ISO 9001:2000. The surveillance audits reveal very few non-conformances. BUT they seem to be 'treading water'. There is ongoing action - but the perception is 'we are no longer making any progress in quality management'.

Objectives

This course is designed as a 'master class' in quality management for ISO 9001-focussed quality system managers.

Benefits

This course:

• Provides insight into the reasons why companies often struggle to derive significant operational and organisational benefits from an ISO 9001 certification.
• Introduces a framework for process understanding - examining the foundations for accepted international practice in process technical coverage, and secondly, introducing a measurement scale for process capability applicable to any process.

Course format

• This is a three-day course. The first day focusses upon the key concepts of international best practices in process management.
• The second and third days are spent in practical work using a software tool to examine process content - to explore the foundations of technical content and capability, the goal of which is to identify process strengths and weaknesses, leading to the assembly of the process improvement plan.
• The case study context relates to development projects undertaken over a six-year period in a certified ISO 9001 management system context.

Practical considerations

• Class size is limited to a maximum of 10 delegates.
• Each delegate is required to bring a laptop computer to the course in order to run the issued software tool.

Who should attend?

This course is designed primarily for experienced quality systems managers, responsible for management systems that have been certified to ISO 9001 for at least 5 years.

Note: Although the focus in this course is on ISO 9001, the principles are applicable to other related management system standards.

Pre-requisites to attending

This course assumes that the attendee is already highly familiar with ISO 9001:2000, and experienced in the practices associated with the maintenance of an ISO 9001 quality management system.

Course topics

• Understand why 'process malaise' is characteristic of companies that have been on the ISO 9001 quality systems management journey for several years.
• Review of key requirements from ISO 9001 relating to process management.
• Review of key concerns in ISO 9001 when relating the technical content of processes to international frameworks of good process practices.
• Review of key issues in ISO 9001 relating to the process capability of processes - for both 'soft' and 'hard' processes, using international standards for the measurement scale for process capability.
• Practical case studies in mapping process evidence to technical process outcomes, in order to identify gaps in coverage.
• Applying the mapping results to identify the strengths and weaknesses of process content and process capability.
• Assembling process improvement plans based on objective data arising from mapping results.