PROPOSAL SUPPORT

PS&J Software Six Sigma can provide senior staff to supplement your proposal team. Our personnel have extensive experience in software development, project management, estimating, CMMI, proposal writing and evaluation for DoD, government, and aerospace customers. We can put people on-site to be resident with your team, or we can provide off-site services such as consultation and review.

Estimates - PS&J Software Six Sigma can use existing internal performance measurements, even very fragmentary measurements,  supplemented by internal anecdotal information and industry data, to develop a process performance model capable of generating quantitative cost estimates and product quality estimates for your project. We use statistical techniques to generate three point estimates that include expected performance and a quantitative estimate of the risk of overrun. You can use this as your Basis of Estimate (BOE) or as a means of evaluating risks in your own estimates.

Risk Analysis - PS&J Software Six Sigma can perform risk identification and analysis either in conjunction with your team or independently as part of a red team review.  We can facilitate risk identification and mitigation planning sessions with your proposal team providing a perspective that is independent of the political pressures within your organization. We can help you quantify cost and schedule risks, estimate their probable impact on project cost, schedule, and product quality, and help you size an appropriate management reserve. We can do this at the project level or for a portfolio of projects.   At the portfolio level we can look at the impact of realizing a project risk on the related project within the portfolio and we can develop strategies for spreading management reserve at the portfolio level.

Development Process & CMMI - We can be particularly helpful if you have a CMMI related process maturity requirement, a requirement to implement a CMMI process improvement initiative, a requirement for an assessment, or a requirement for collecting and reporting particular process metrics. We can either author the process related material directly or help your team write it.  PS&J Software Six Sigma's experience with CMM and CMMI goes back to the late 80’s.  We have written process intensive proposals, been assessed as part of an award process, participated on assessment teams, and managed a high maturity organization. We can use our experience to identify gaps in your capability and write a credible proposal for closing them with minimal cost and disruption to your operation.

Proposal Review & Evaluation - Finally, PS&J Software Six Sigma can function as a red team, providing an independent review of your software development proposal and identifying weaknesses and opportunities for improvement.  We can do this from the perspective of a customer or a 3rd party evaluator, relative to cost, quality & risk.  We understand typical industry capabilities and we know what is credible.

PROGRAM MANAGEMENT

Planning - PS&J Software Six Sigma offers facilitated team program planning workshops that cover:

• Stakeholder identification and analysis
• Identification, clarification, and quantification of project goals and key requirements
• Identification clarification, and quantification of project planning constraints
• Definition of a development strategy
• Preliminary identification of product components
• Creation of a Work Breakdown Structure
• Definition and assignment of project roles and responsibilities
• Definition of a product development process as well as the process and project measurements that will be used to manage the project
• Development of a product development performance model that can be used for estimating effort and product quality
• Development of product component size estimates
• Development of product component effort estimates
• Development of a staffing plan
• Development of a schedule and Earned Value (EV) plan
• Development of a process and product quality management plan
• Risk identification, analysis, and mitigation planning
• An agreed to baseline project plan

Our approach is applicable to new product development, product enhancement, and product maintenance activities.  We use three point estimates throughout, providing expected performance and estimating the uncertainty in the estimates, thus allowing quantification of project cost and schedule risk.  Our planning strategy is optimized for incremental development.  We typically create a high level plan that covers the entire project along with incremental next phases plans that provide just in time planning for the next phase.  This approach is well suited to incremental development and integrates well with phase gate reviews, if they are part of your project management methodology.  We normally use, and strongly recommend, Earned Value tracking because it avoids the 90% done syndrome and makes it easy to continuously forecast effort and time to complete. PS&J Software Six Sigma can provide a project plan at any level of detail. For example, we can use our planning workshop in the context of a proposal effort to create a preliminary plan and follow up with a second post-award workshop to create a detail plan for actual execution.

PS&J Software Six Sigma includes all available team members in the workshop activity.  We have found “bottoms up�? plans are more accurate than "top down".  Fewer items are overlooked and left out.  Dependencies are easier to identify. Bottoms up estimates also tend to be more accurate than top down estimates due to the statistics of error cancellation when aggregating multiple uncorrelated estimates.  We have found that we can build a far better plan with 10 people in three days than with one senior person in 30 days!

Measurement Driven Project Management and Control - Projects often get into trouble because management is unable to anticipate process related problems and take timely corrective action.   This leaves the project manager in the difficult position of trying to directly manage negative process outcomes (over budget, late, low quality) after they have already become apparent. At that point, the only options are overtime, adding cost, and slipping schedule and in all likelihood delivering a product with quality problems. In terms of Six Sigma, the issue is trying to directly manage outcomes (Y’s) rather and manage their causes (X’s).  PS&J Software Six Sigma can help mangers identify the causes of their problems and take appropriate corrective actions with enough lead-time to avoid problem escalation and serious disruption to the project plan. Frequent small midcourse corrections can prevent a project being seriously off track during its endgame. We do this by using process measurement data in the context of a process performance model to extrapolate current project performance down stream to integration and test where results of process deficiencies usually show up as serious cost, schedule, and quality problems.  We use early product quality data to drive effective process management and we use continuous extrapolation of estimate effort and time to complete based on Earned Value (EV) data to keep a laser like focus on the trend in Estimate to Complete (ETC) and the probable number of post delivery defects that will be found in the product.  The net effect is to empower program management to proactively control project performance rather than just identify, report, and attempt to deal with on-going problems.

PS&J Software Six Sigma can provide staff experienced in thee use of measurement driven management techniques to supplement your project management office or to coach your current project managers.

OUTSOURCING & ACQUISITIONS

If you are in the process of selecting an outsourcing partner, a subcontractor, or considering an acquisition, PS&J Software Six Sigma can help reduce your risk by providing an independent assessment of the target organization’s software engineering and project management capabilities based on their own process performance data. Our assessments are measurement driven and typically involve development of a process capability model that can be used to quantitatively assess effectiveness of development and management processes in terms of business performance measures such as development cost, cycle time, and product quality.  Our assessments are suitable for use in a due diligence investigation in the context of an acquisition and can be augmented to consider quality and liability risks in existing product lines. We can examine the statistical quality of the existing product lines and estimate the risk of using them as the basis for enhanced products.

PS&J Software Six Sigma's assessment methodology complements model driven assessments like the CMMI by looking at the quantitative effectiveness of processes rather than just their conformance to a model like CMMI.  In a world where every vendor claims to be CMMI level 5, we can help you sort out those with truly effective processes from those with processes that have been designed to assess well but that don’t really perform in the real world.

Once you have teamed with (or acquired) another organization, you will need to be able to integrate their development activities with your own and effectively manage a distributed project development team.  If you don’t know how to get started or feel you need to make improvements, PS&J Software Six Sigma can help.   We use a measurement driven approach to project management that provides real time data that fully instruments the development process across multiple locations and provides direct support for timely management decision making.

PROGRAM REVIEWS & PROJECT RECOVERY

PS&J Software Six Sigma can provide program reviews and product evaluations intended to prevent common problems and reduce project risks in critical areas. We can operate totally independently to serve as a check on your internal activities or we can provide a team member to augment your internal team by providing it with our experience and methodology.

Customers have found our independent reviews of requirements quality to be particularly beneficial. We review requirements for completeness, consistency, redundancy, realizability, testability, and verifiability.  We use analytical techniques to assess requirements for orthogonality and completeness.

PS&J Software Six Sigma also can use early inspection and testing data to identify product quality risks and defect prone product components.  If this is done early enough, it can save considerable downstream effort in test and integration and result in a higher quality product. We can identify the highest risk components to a product early for potential rework. We can examine the results of system test and or field data to estimate the number of defects remaining in a product, the effort required to repair them, and the associated risks to customer satisfaction.  Product quality evaluation can also be particularly useful when planning the enhancement of an existing product because it allows us to identify trouble prone modules that pose a high risk to the revised product.

If a project is have issues with cost and schedule performance, product quality, or excessive re-work, PS&J Software Six Sigma can assess the capability of existing processes, identify shortcomings, and implement fixes to get the project back on track quickly.