Our TenForce Execution product can be parameterized in many ways. We successfully support Scrum, helpdesks, manufacturing plants, complaint handling... using the standard TenForce features. One such example we would like to highlight in this post is using our product - TenForce Execution - to follow-up CMMI compliancy of a department or for portfolios of projects.

So this is how we worked it out:

• The Quality Assurance (QA) department of our customer has defined a standard development process - containing different disciplines, artifacts and procedures - which is targeted towards a specific level of CMMI (they specifically aimed at going from level 2 to level 3). If project managers or application managers follow the process completely they can obtain a CMMI compliancy of maximum 90%, according to CMMI level X standards.

• This process is loaded in TenForce Execution as a template which is initiated every time a new project starts. A TenForce template is a set of interlinked items that can be re-used and instantiated for specific cases. In the screenshots below you can see some available templates (upper) and how to process templates (lower).

Figure 1: Available Templates

Figure 2: Process Template

• The project manager then starts to check this fairly extensive process and indicates which steps - artifacts or procedures - he wants to execute in his project (ACCEPT). He also indicates which steps he will NOT execute (REJECT). He needs to add a reason why in that case.

• We implemented this using our “custom field” feature. The figure below shows how a process is defined.

Figure 3: Define the Process

• Typically, someone called the ‘project process validator’ is involved who reviews all projects on the ACCEPT & REJECTS of each process step in a project. This guy approves the process defined by the project manager for his specific process. Because we need to capture the OK / NOK stamp of the ‘project process validator’ some additional custom fields were also configured for this purpose. In the screenshot below you can see such a QA stamp for a project step.

Figure 4: QA Stamp for a project step

• So after these actions a project has an approved (or rejected) process for execution, which was defined by the project manager, but based upon the standard company process template.

• By adding some simple custom scripts, the system is able to display several process-related metrics on the overall project item

- The overall ACCEPT score,both in percentage and absolute values:

* eg 70% of proposed items will be executed

* or 35 out of 50

- The same for the overall REJECT score.

- And because the QA department also put in the CMMI compliancy score of the complete process (let’s say 90%), we also calculated the specific CMMI compliancy score for that specific project. For which we multiplied the overall compliancy score (90%) with the ACCEPT score (70%), resulting in a specific project CMMI compliancy score (being 90% * 70* = 63%). Screenshot below: some CMMI scores.

Figure 5: CMMI scores

So this means the QA department is able to follow-up for each specific project on how they are doing towards the CMMI level X standards. This is of course pretty cool - for QA people ;-) - because they don’t even need to perform their monthly Excel distribution or merging circus anymore.

The management of our customer is also measured and evaluated based upon the overall CMMI score of their projects. And what does a manager do in that case ? He needs a report and figures to find out how far he is in reach of his objective.

And because we have all the information in the product, it wasn’t that hard to configure a specific view and create the report with the data, graphs, pivots that they required via our standard Excel based reporting engine. The screenshots below show the Excel report engine (top), an Excel report extract (middle) and some Excel report graphs (down).

Figure 6: Excel Report Engine

Figure 7: Excel Report Extract

Figure 8: Excel Report Graph

By doing all this in a shared web-based tool, the customer is able to get rid of all the project specific Excel files that were distributed and collected again each month; then passed through to a reporting team which merged these files via Excel macro’s and finally produced the reporting the IT management required.

To summarize: Better, Faster, Cheaper

We brought following business benefits for our customer:

• They have a more transparent and consolidated view on the state of their projects.
• Management has an instant and online view on their objectives.
• And they save quite some money and time, because they were able to get rid of a rather complex and cumbersome Excel processing workflow.