Concepts:
Environment Practices
Some key practices used to implement a new development environment,
consisting of the Rational Unified Process together with tools, are:
Assess the Project and the Organization 
Assess the current state of the project and the organization to better
understand what parts of the environment you should improve. You will also
better understand how to implement the environment.
The following pages explain how to assess the state of a project and its
surrounding organization:
Implement Process and Tools Incrementally
Implement the environment, process, and tools incrementally so people on the
projects won't be overwhelmed by many new factors all at once. By
implementing the environment incrementally, it's possible to focus on a subset
of the environment, which increases the probability of success.
Introduce the environment one piece at a time. The result of the development
organization assessment helps decide which parts of the process and which tools
you should start to introduce. Normally, focus on those areas where the
development organization has its biggest problems.
Incrementally implementing the environment might mean that in a first, or
inception, iteration, you focus on introducing the Requirements discipline
together with the Requirements tools. In the second iteration, the focus is on
introducing the Analysis & Design discipline together with its modeling tools.
In subsequent iterations, more and more parts of the environment are
introduced.
See Concepts: Implementing a Process in a Project
for details.
Manage and plan the environment activities just as you would with all other
activities in the software development project.
Implementing a new process and new tools on a project is a complex task.
Changing the way people work can jeopardize the success of a project. Experience
shows that when compared to the development activities, the environment
activities are sometimes overlooked by the project manager.
The environment activities must be managed and planned like all other
activities in a software development project. Therefore, it's important that the
project manager has a good understanding of the new process and tools. Sometimes
it's difficult for the project manager to allocate the necessary time to learn
about both a new process and potentially several new tools. In that case, the
project manager needs support from someone who knows both how to implement the
environment and who has previously been involved in doing so. Even if the
project manager has the right set of skills and experience, we recommend that
you involve "environment-implementation expertise", as it greatly
increases the chances for the project to succeed.
See the Project Management discipline for details
on how to manage and plan a software development project, including the
environment activities. Also see Concepts: Implementing a
Process in a Project.
Use mentors to introduce a new process in a project. Experience shows
that using mentors is crucial if you want the implementation of a new process to
succeed. If you don't have mentors, there's a clear risk that the people on the
project will fall back into their old habits. The mentor acts as a driver of
change.
The project needs both the resources and the budget for mentoring on the
project. The occurrence of some mentoring activities need to be planned, such as
leading workshops. It's important that the process mentor understands the
significance of being a change driver and makes sure that the work progresses. It's also
important that the mentor becomes dispensable and that there is an end to it,
therefore, the mentor needs to transfer both knowledge and responsibilities to
members of the project. See Concepts: Mentoring for
more details on what a mentor is and what a mentor does.
Distribute the ownership for the process among the people on the project
because they're more likely to adopt and learn the new process faster. The
resulting development case is better when the "real experts", those
people on the project, develop it themselves. If you distribute the ownership
for the process, it will also reduce the likelihood of the project becoming too
heavily dependent on outside consultants.
As soon as possible appoint people on the project to be responsible for each
core process discipline. This person has primary responsibility for configuring
that part of the process and the corresponding part of the development case. For
example, being responsible for a core process discipline like requirements, means
you're responsible for that part of the development case. Each person needs to
be responsible for one or several core process disciplines, and is someone who
knows the area well and who can mentor other developers.
A process engineer acts as mentor to the people on the project who own the
different parts of the process and assists them when they configure the
process.
Think 'Return-On-Investment'
Think 'return-on-investment' when you configure the process: focus on those
things that will pay back more than the investment.
Experience shows that some projects tend to spend too much time and resources
developing extensive guidelines, an extensive development case, and additional
process-related material. There are three major problems with this:
- People do not read extensive descriptions.
- Doing everything right from the beginning is very difficult. It's better
to do something less extensive, try it out, and then adjust it.
- It removes the focus from mentoring. People with process knowledge need to
have mentoring, not writing extensive descriptions, assigned as their
primary task.
When developing guidelines, you need to keep in mind the
return-on-investment. Try to reuse existing guidelines. For example, a
cost-efficient alternative to developing a complete use-case modeling guideline
is to let a good example of an existing use-case description serve as the
Use-Case Modeling Guidelines.
In practice, you can't measure the investment and the pay-back, then compare
the two. As a process engineer, the most important thing to always keep in mind
is that whatever you do, it must have a substantial pay back for the developers.
Keep People Informed and Involved
Keep people informed about the new process and tools, and have them involved
in the work because the greatest threat to any change in an organization is
peoples' attitudes towards the change. Introducing a new process and tools in
any organization means that people have to change the way they work. People have
a natural resistance toward change. There's always the risk of falling into a
negative spiral, where people's negative attitudes lead to poorer results which
then lead to even more negative attitudes.
The following lists some actions you can take that may help prevent negative
attitudes from forming among people in the organization:
- Set realistic expectations. Do not oversell the new process or the new
tools.
- Involve key people in the change work. Let them be part of the pilot
project and give them responsibility for parts of the process. See Distribute
Process Ownership.
- Explain why the change needs to be done. What problems does the
organization have that need to be solved? What changes in technology require
a new process and new tools? How will you benefit from using these new tools
and process?
- Inform all people in the organization about what is happening. For
example, keep all departments informed about what is going on. This
information doesn't have to be in very great detail; the important thing is
that they receive some information.
- Remember stakeholders, such as customers or sponsors. For example, if you
change from a more waterfall-like development approach to an iterative
development approach, the stakeholders must understand how an iterative
development project is managed and how progress is measured. In an iterative
development project, for example, they can't expect a completely frozen
design at an early milestone. They would also be affected when projects
change the way they capture requirements.
Educate people about the new process and the new tools because they need
to understand both the new process and how to use the new tools.
There are several ways to educate people, including the following methods
that have been used:
- Standard training courses
- "Boot-camps" consisting of one to five weeks of concentrated,
hands-on training. Not many organizations can afford boot-camps, however,
they have proven to be efficient if there are many new factors for the
people in the project.
- Mentoring works when you have a mentor who reviews results, leads
workshops, and answers questions. Done well, mentoring can be a very
efficient way to transfer knowledge.
- "Kick-start" workshops are an efficient way to get the people
up-to-speed in a day when introducing a new part of the environment. In this
type of workshop, people work using their real project material and
following the new parts of the development case using the new templates,
guidelines, and tools. Typically, a process engineer and a tool specialist
would be responsible for this workshop. Do not spend a lot of time
developing training material for a kick-start workshop. The main purpose is
to give hands-on experience using new sections of the development case
together with templates, guidelines, and tools. The kick-start workshop is
also a way to verify the development case, templates, guidelines, and
tools.
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© 1987 - 2001 Rational Software Corporation
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