Productivity and Quality Office

A firm requiring extensive software to operate expends significant amounts of cash to have trustworthy software. And it does not always succeed. Managing your suppliers can also be a challenging task.

New products must be brought to market faster because of market pressures. New approaches to development, alongside new programming languages and frameworks, have appeared to aid the swift release of new products like bank accounts, insurance premiums or phone tariffs. These new technologies promise to revolutionise development by embracing concepts such as Agile, hybrid models, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, quantum computing and machine learning, among others.

More and more business is involved in these developments to ensure that what is needed is developed.

Software development requires improvements, and a productivity and quality office can aid its accomplishment.

This is the next step to taking your company to the next level. While comparing your software development projects to others gives you an idea of their performance and areas for growth, setting up a productivity and quality office enables you to constantly monitor and improve them, leading to optimal cost savings and higher quality outcomes.

1. The initial metric we consider is the Software Product (the function points) as an ISO/IEC functional standard. By using this metric, we can transparently and audibly compare results obtained, regardless of the development paradigm, team type, or technology used. It is a reliable means of comparison, even when utilizing predictive (waterfall), agile, or similar paradigms. 

2. The process must be standardised and normalised to ensure consistency. All parties involved should collaborate to establish a shared process for delivering estimates and measurements of the software product, and collecting the remaining values required for calculating the indicators. From effort data associated with the software product, such as cost data, defects detected, test cases generated, etc. 

3. The third is data exploitation. The productivity and quality team crafts a personalised dashboard to facilitate the organisation’s decision-making process. The dashboard presents solutions to the questions that the organisation seeks to answer and offers comparative rankings of various teams, suppliers, and areas. 

In a productivity office, we will provide solutions to these problems, among others:

• How productive are my developments?
• Which areas perform the best?
• Can I optimise my development cycle?
• How much does each product unit cost me?
• Which supplier is the best value for money?
• Am I more interested in developing with an in-house team or outsourcing?
• How can I optimise the costs of my software development?

Benefits of a productivity and quality office

• Savings from the first operating month.
• An estimate process that is centralised, transparent, auditable, and consistent throughout.
• Details on expenses, productivity, and excellence, obtained via a Dashboard.
• It enhances your capability to impartially assess your development process and suppliers.
• Compare the efficiency of Agile with traditional methods in a precise manner.
• Compare yourself with the market.

Who would be interested in having a productivity and quality office?

• CIO: To help make informed decisions based on objective information. 
• Development Manager: To enhance software development productivity. 
• Project managers: to make sure ISO standards are adhered to when making estimates. 
• PMO Director: to ensure that all developments under their responsibility are evaluated consistently according to ISO standards and to maintain an established productivity. 
• Technology procurement: Refining development tenders to assist in supplier selection. 

Why LedaMC?

• LedaMC sets the standard for improving software productivity worldwide. We belong to the main global organisations for measuring and estimating software (IFPUG, COSMIC, ISBSG, …) and actively participate in a range of international events and conferences. 
• Certified consultants to assist organisations. 
• 20 years of experience enhancing our clients’ software development. We have managed over 30 offices for productivity and quality, with some being active for more than a decade.