Getting some process going

Dear Bob ...We work with a software vendor whose app we host. They are small (20-ish employees), we have to cover a lot of customers and pretty close to 24/7. We are, unfortunately, their largest install, certainly larger than they designed for.There have been scaling problems.My problem is in figuring out how to get us past the "cowboy" software support process. When I started in IT in the early 90’s I worked f

Dear Bob ...

We work with a software vendor whose app we host. They are small (20-ish employees), we have to cover a lot of customers and pretty close to 24/7. We are, unfortunately, their largest install, certainly larger than they designed for.

There have been scaling problems.

My problem is in figuring out how to get us past the "cowboy" software support process. When I started in IT in the early 90’s I worked for ATT in New Jersey so I found all about software quality Bell Labs style. And worked in electronics before that and got the Deming et al background. I even was a Fagan Inspection facilitator. We counted function points.

Years later I find myself in a different universe. There's been lots of growth, and more potential but we have very little common understanding of the need for configuration management or a rigorous testing/promotion process. We have a test environment but it's often bypassed with my management going straight to the vendor, changes going straight to production.

CMM level 0.5 all around. Maybe -1.

Managers have been around at large orgs and pay lip service to the process thing, and we have made improvements, but we also suffer from the pride of "let's put on the show right here in the barn!" thinking -– we're small, unconventional and smarter than the rest, yessir.

And even when we have made a stride or two in the quality direction, each personnel change on our side or the vendor side results in the whole thing falling down and going backwards, because it really wasn’t a core process change.

So where do I look for tips on how to get us all on the software process cluetrain?

Your article "A scandal unveiled," (Keep the Joint Running, 9/15/2003) was right up the same alley, but pointing in the opposite direction –- about enterprise apps that don't downscale. Well, we need the other thing –- upscale the brains to the support the enterprise approach, because we are already in the enterprise world.

My web searches only find the enterprise stuff -– ITIL, CMM, Six Sigma and all. Those are overwhelmingly complex and I get glassy eyed looks mentioning anything like that to my compatriots.

So are there any "software process improvement for SMB dummies" kind of programs I can latch on to?

- In Chaos

Dear In Chaos ...

Sounds to me like you do have a scaling-down challenge. You need software quality assurance and change control, only you need the "lite" versions.