A Situational Assessment Method for Software Product Management

There is very little literature supporting software product managers in their work, even though they play a crucial role within software product management organizations. There are large solutions for the improvement of software product management practices, but these are not applicable to most small and medium sized organizations. This research-in-progress paper presents a general incremental assessment method that takes the organization’s situational context into account: the Situational Assessment Method (SAM). We applied this scientific method to the field of software product management to solve the aforementioned problem. Our method presents organizations with an assessment of their current maturity level, and suggests steps to incrementally improve their processes. SAM is a focus area oriented instrument with a different set of capabilities for each area. The context of an organization is taken into account by examining various situational factors that describe the context of the organization, and the organization itself. This context is then used to determine which capabilities apply to the organization being assessed. A situation specific advice indicating how software product management practices can be improved upon is then created based on a gap analysis of the currently implemented capabilities, and the capabilities that should be implemented.