Process improvement and the corporate balance sheet

The Software Engineering Initiative, process-improvement program undertaken by the Software Systems Laboratory in Raytheon´s equipment division in mid-1988 is reviewed. The three phases of the program are the process-stabilization phase, in which the emphasis is on distilling the elements of the process actually being used and progressively institutionalizing it across all projects, the process-control phase, in which emphasis shifts to instrumenting projects to gather significant data and analyze the data to understand how to control the process, and the process-change phase, in which the emphasis is on determining how to adjust the process as a result of measurement analysis and how to diffuse the new methods among practitioners. It is shown that the process-improvement initiative has improved the equipment division´s bottom line, increased productivity, and changed the corporate culture. Much of the savings came from reducing rework.<>