Identify and Classify the Critical Success Factors for a Successful Process Deployment

Nowadays, organizations need to respond to customer’ demands with quality products and services. Models and standards have been developed to help organizations to achieve these objectives, such as Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and IDEAL. This highlights the importance of having an effective process deployment strategy in order that processes can be adopted, used, and institutionalized. However, the implementation of these models and standards in organizations presents difficulties that include (1) improvement efforts are not aligned with business goals, (2) lack of leadership and visible commitment to improvement efforts, (3) the process does not respond to business needs, and (4) efforts to implement technical aspects ignore strategies based on the social aspects (Messnarz et al. 2008). According to Niazi (Niazi et al. 2005), the problem of process improvement is not the lack of standards or models, but the lack of a strategy to implement them. Not considering the social aspects of a strategy for process deployment threatens the institutionalization of the processes deployed. Most researchers are focused on improving the technology. However, a few of them mention other important factors such as culture, change management, people, communication, and training. McDermid and Bennet (1999) have argued that human factors for software process improvement have been ignored. According to Zahran (1998), the inadequacy of proposals on the implementation of process improvement is one of the most common reasons for failure of improvement initiatives.

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