Situational Process Improvement in Software Product Management

Abstract

Product management has become an essential strategic practice in most companies. This is increasingly more so in the software domain. Here organizations are rapidly evolving their products, have to deal with thousands of requirements, large numbers of stakeholders, and the alignment between products and strategy. A good product manager needs to understand what the consumer is going to buy, make sure it gets built, and ensure it is done profitably. To successfully compete, product managers must not only focus on the product itself, but on the entire software product management (SPM) lifecycle. If the SPM activities do not get enough attention, the quality of a product decreases, release dates are not met, and managing customers’ expectations becomes a large problem. Many software product management organizations (SPMOs) have implemented customized processes for SPM based on their situational characteristics. There has been research into the situational factors that influence this customization, but the precise effects of the situational factors are nearly never detailed. Nor is a method provided which incorporates the situational aspects and has been applied in practice. The main research question for this dissertation therefore is: How can software product management practices be improved in a situational manner? This research question is answered in three parts. The first part presents an overview of all practices that constitute SPM. The overview consists of the SPM competence model that shows the high level practices that constitute SPM, and the SPM maturity matrix that lists all of the low level practices within the high level practices in a best practice implementation order. SPM organizations can use this matrix to map and improve their SPM practices incrementally. The next part of the dissertation provides an overview of the situational factors that affect SPM. Its main result, the situational factor effects catalog (SFEC), provides this overview by showing in detail three different types of effects that situational factors have on the implemented SPM practices and the implementation thereof: 1) The effects situational factors have on the practices that are implemented in the daily practice of SPM. 2) The effects situational factors have on the practices that should be implemented by an SPMO. 3) The effects situational factors have in the selection process of method fragments to fulfill those practices. Researchers can use the SFEC in the development of method fragments and software process improvement models, and practitioners can use it to gain insight into the effects of changes in their situational characteristics. The third part of the dissertation presents a method with which SPMOs can assess and improve their SPM in a situational manner: the situational assessment method (SAM). This incremental assessment method presents SPMOs with an assessment of their current maturity level, and suggests improvements based on their situational context. The context of an organization into account by examining various situational factors which are used to determine the capabilities that apply to the SPMO being assessed.