Substantial work on improving practice 2/2

Earlier this year we initiated on 4 projects the establishment of metrics which now have greatly facilitated the development of estimates, planning and monitoring of the individual and collective efficiency on these projects. Continuing task estimates requested by the clients in third party maintenance have gained in speed and reliability. As for benchmarks, they have been refined over the past several months allowing us to go to the next stage and to be able to optimize the efficiency of our teams.Without being really complex, this job requires above all a little discipline from the project managers and reflection (what are the best work units to retain, how to define them?). But once initiated the saving in time and the efficiency which will be generated can more than justify the investment, Mihai, Elena, Ion and Dan can surely attest to this.This work is continuing now on “new projects”, and others that are still on the list of projects to be changed by the end of this year using the same type of method.On the other hand, following the process reviews involving Mike, Pierre, Viorica, Maxim and others, in May, this has allowed us to make large strides in the evolution of our common methodology system.The principle of these reviews, as always directed with great care by Pierre de Thelin is to improve the various aspects of measurement and traceability, with the theme of integrating the methods from the CMMI model (levels 2 and 3).The collection, synthesis and improvement, in research and development has been initiated or is in the planning stage, concerning such topics as standardization of project indicators and development of reporting tools, interoperability of our planning tools, cost management and defect tracking (ePole-metric-mantis trio), with the possible integration of new tools like Enterprise Architect or Jazz, sharing of our knowledge on configuration management, the evolution of our test practice and the establishment of traceability requirements (within the CMMI definition) from the definition of requirements, to correcting anomalies, through all the phases of the software development cycle.Specifically, new forms for commercial offers, better formulated, more detailed, more instructive – and more educational for our customers – have already emerged thanks to Helène, Sophie and Monica. Many translations, provided by Alex and Ioana, which will give access to all the corporate resources in the universal language of English (the default language of Pentalog, will always remain French). Work is continuing on the Quality plans and is nearing completion.Ioana started a few weeks ago to collect and synthesize information on test practices in order to prepare the activities of the work groups that will be animated by Cornel in regards to the evolution of our tools and practices; Cornel recently validated guidelines about conference management, prepared by Ioana and Cata while LudoG is tearing his hair out trying to imagine automated project dashboards, related to our tools.In short, the Deming wheel is rotating, quickly, or as fast as possible. And I also must improve myself: I need to communicate more…