Book Review: Can We Improve the Ability to Improve?

Abstract

Improvement is key for organizations. In spite of its importance success rates of improvement and innovation projects are quite low. In this paper a book review of ImprovAbility: Success with Process Improvement is presented. The model, developed as a result of a study on the characteristics of successful and failed projects on the topic, presents 20 parameters that in°uence success and failure in improvement projects. The importance of software and its globalization have pushed software process improvement (SPI) initiatives to a higher level. However, SPI e®orts are not new. For instance, the founding of the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) by the U.S. Department of Defense dates back to 1984 and rst technical reports describing the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) were issued three years later. Since then, many organizations adopted existing models and standards, such as ISO 9000 series of standards, ISO 15504, the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). Many of these organizations have used considerable resources for SPI. However, investments in SPI e®orts often have not led to the overall improvements and failure rates are still too high. This disheartening failure rates in International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering Vol. 24, No. 3 (2014) 517–519 #.c World Scienti c Publishing Company DOI: 10.1142/S0218194014800011