Process Performance and Innovation, a bond of heart and reason

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Process performance and innovation create a bond of heart and reason within any flourishing business or, at the very least, any enterprise must become innovative in order to flourish because innovation almost always leads to a gain in performance on one level or another.

Thus, the company that wants to perform must innovate and the innovative company will perform… most certainly!

On the other hand, performance and processes are equally intimately linked to the company because, in the end, performance is directly dependent on processes, it is only a reflection of your processes.

The Performance of Software Development Process

Once you have defined the appropriate management style (Traditional vs. Agile) for your software development project, it is equally important to ensure that the corporate functions to deliver the service are well defined and clear to each and everyone. For example, at Analystik, the core business service is “software development” and the four main functions in performing this service are Initialization, Completion, Delivery, and Closing.

To increase the performance of your software development team, the functions of the software development process itself need to be well defined. For each function, the purpose and definition of the function must be clear. Expected inputs and outputs must be clearly identified and defined, as well as the roles of the parties and resources involved.

However, given the size of your company, it is desirable that the software development documentation be as concise as possible; if each function can be described simply on a single page using a Visio schema, then it may be more consulted and monitored by all parties.

But even if your corporate functions are well defined, you must constantly question yourself and reevaluate your effectiveness and efficiency on a regular basis. And it is during these challenges that innovation often emerges. Challenging the effectiveness and efficiency of your functions should be a recurring process within any company, be it a software development business or not, but that’s another matter…

Innovation in software development can emerge at two levels: development tools and software development process

Typically, innovation can emerge in two ways in a company, for the majority of sectors of activity, in IT as elsewhere. Innovation can be defined in terms of product innovation or process innovation. Product innovation means the creation of new products and services or the improvement of existing ones, while process innovation aims at reducing production costs or improving the production efficiency of existing goods or services.

Product and process innovation applies favorably to IT context and software development performance; ie, your IT development team can play an important role in developing new products and services (product innovation) or in improving the production chain (process innovation).

Similarly, the IT team can revise its own software development tools or software development process and innovate, either by using or developing new technologies (product innovation) or by improving the performance of its software development process (process innovation).

Conclusion

Finally, how to increase your software development team performance?

Fundamentally, one must choose one’s battles and be able to detect a failure (defect, weakness, etc.) or recognize an opportunity.

For example, a “compliance” project imposed by a legal entity in any sector of activity can become, seen from the right angle, either an opportunity for product innovation (good or service) or opportunity for process innovation (increase the performance of some expensive or simply non-performing business processes).

 

Have a good project,

Denis Paul & Michel

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