Effectiveness Measurement At Galorath Still Focusing On the Positive
I was in an ISO review today at Galorath Inc. I saw customer satisfaction scores that were through the roof (in a good way.) I saw compliments (from the ISO compliments file) that were flattering. I asked about the complaints file (also an ISO requirement) I was told we had no complaints since the past review. I personally appreciate the compliments but learn more from complaints. When pressed I found nothing was reported as complaints. But there certainly had been some areas where we could have done better.
Process improvement is about finding where things could be better, not about painting rosy pictures. We are in the business and even we like to concentrate on the good and minimize the bad.
We are probably better than most in this regard. Process improvement and improvements in customer satisfaction is important. And to achieve these we have to identify and stress where we can do better.
The Mistake of Measuring Everything
I recently participated in a seminar with Larry Dribin of Pearl Street Group. Larry did a beautiful job with a talk called something like “You Get What You measure” Afterwards I added the corollary “If you measure everything you get nothing”
I have seen a number of organizations that just start measuring everything. They figure they will do something with the measurements sometime. Measurement becomes a burden with no ROI. And people can’t respond by doing the best job on what they are measured against. Read more
Reducing Software Maintenance and Total Ownership Costs
Over 75% of the costs of software are in software maintenance. To address this I (Dan Galorath) participated in a best practices conference held by the IT Metrics & productivity Institute. I was fascinated by Herb Krasner’s presentation on software evolution versus software maintenance.
Herb defined software evolution as the set of activities, both technical and managerial, that ensures that software continues to meet organizational and business objectives in a cost effective way. He further defines evolutionary system types as either having an Imprecise statement of a real-world problem which generally changes over time or a system that becomes part of the world that it models/implement whose acceptance depends entirely on opinion and judgment. Evolutionary is in contrast with a maintenance system where the problem can be completely stated and where a change to the specification defines a new problem and a new system.
Herb Krasner , David Garmus, and Dan Galorath talks all illustrated how the use of metrics and management associated with measurement through both development and maintenance can reduce total ownership costs dramatically.
We then heard from Bob Lawhorn who spoke on how his company, Computer Aid Inc (CAI) actually saves organizations money and increases quality by taking over legacy system maintenance and support. It was one of the most inspiring illustrations on why we should do all this I ever saw. He spoke of taking over these systems with new hires, applying the CAI processes and measurement and reducing customer costs by around 30%. And they have been doing this for over 20 years.
Overall I came away inspired, seeing how software estimation, measurement, process, and real management of software like manufacturing is making a difference.
I will be presenting my talk on reducing total ownership costs several more times this year in partnership with CAI.
