Process Innovation Imperative A complete framework for building a capable software product development organisation

Software engineering standards focus on the direct delivery of software and often fail to connect with the realities of business. Multitudes of concepts are used in the business world to cover topics such as: learning, decisionmaking, people management, organizational structure design and innovation processes that are not sufficiently covered in the software engineering domain. Furthermore, the differences between process and product innovation are not understood and not managed as separate competencies. This work proposes an integrated framework that can be used by software producing organisations to innovate, build, and deliver software products to market. It deals with the critically interlinked and complex systems required to deal with the aspects of commercial software delivery. The organisational system requires concepts such as process management, learning management, strategic product management and innovation management. The Process Innovation Imperative dependants on the ability of the organization to deal with these principles. This chapter introduces the Strategic Product Development Model, Learning Model and People Maturity Model as tools to use during the evolutionary or revolutionary cycles the organisation will go through in its life cycle. The process innovation imperative focuses on the ability to revolutionize, stabilize and intellectualize the software producing organization.