Value-driven process management

Abstract

To survive in a fast-changing environment, almost all companies strive for continuous efficiency improvement, reducing the cost of non-quality and optimizing product strategies. Simultaneously, it is thus crucial to improve product strategy and the product development processes. However, such improvement programs often fail due to lack of leadership and organizational misalignment. Operational constraints such as project pressure, client interaction, and strategic dependencies are often neglected, thus making a proposed change program a mere theoretic exercise-without much buy-in from the trenches. Despite access to a substantial body of knowledge of methods such as Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Six Sigma, many organizations still struggle in practice. Most organizations fail to align necessary transformations with concrete business objectives. This chapter shows how to set up and drive a value-driven process environment based upon explicit business objectives and how to deliver sustainable value. It goes beyond theoretical method frameworks and emphasizes hands-on change management. Value-driven process evolution underlines the need continuously to manage the transformation based on business objectives and operational constraints. From these, a specific and tailored approach toward achieving engineering excellence is derived. A case study shows how value-driven process management was used over a period of several years. Improving productivity and efficiency is selected as a hands-on example how practically to implement value-driven process evolution.