Methods:

Change Management: Improving an organization’s results begins with understanding and improving the organization’s behavior. Business process consulting works with all of a company’s components—technology, resources, and employees—to move the organization’s performance in the right direction. The most challenging part of any improvement is convincing people to change. Most people look at how a change will impact them before they look at the benefits to the business. The tools and techniques of change management, force-field analysis, SWOT, and more, help organizations bridge the divide between the need to improve and the ability to do so. The business process consultant has the experience and knowledge to help make it happen.

Lean Six Sigma: A fusion of the lean production philosophy and Six Sigma management science, Lean Six Sigma was a direct result of the manufacturing sector eliminating non-valued-added, wasteful, inefficient, or redundant production steps. Lean Six Sigma is now used not only in manufacturing but also in the service and government sectors. Adaptations of Lean Six Sigma have even led to the creation of software development, delivery, and maintenance methods like DevOps! Lean Six Sigma particularly shapes the team and collaborative practices to create a better and more predictable end-value for the customer. It looks for ways to make employee roles more streamlined and specialized, and for your overall product creation or services to deliver more consistency and low defect rates.

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI): Capability Maturity Model began as a set of software development best practices derived from the processes of industry titans like IBM, Lockheed, and Northrop Grumman. The original Software CMM was created at the direction of the US Department of Defense to improve the quality and predictability of defense software development. Over the decades, the Software CMM was joined by the Systems Engineering CMM, the Data Management Maturity Model, and other topic-specific CMMs. Today, the CMMI provides an evolutionary path to better processes in systems, hardware, and software development, services of all types from retail to banking to restaurants, data management, systems resilience, supply chain management, and human resources. And the CMMI is now used worldwide, with more CMMI activities occurring in China and India than in any other country. CMMI version 2.0, released in 2018, includes linkage between how processes operate and the value that the process delivers to an organization and its customers. Government contractors continue to earn CMMI certification along with many other organizations seeking to objectively demonstrate their performance excellence.

DevOps: Development Operations is an application of Lean principles to help organizations improve their overall ability to develop, deliver, and maintain products and services in coordination with and at the pace of customers. DevOps was originally created for the software world at the junction between agile development, information technology infrastructure management, and Lean value-added and mistake proofing. DevOps is a cultural philosophy to strengthen the relationship between product development (often software), operations, and customers. DevSecOps incorporates the concept of security into the DevOps framework. The DevSecOps philosophy is that everyone is responsible for security in the software or product development process.

Agile: Agile methodologies (Scrum, XP, Kanban, etc.) are about driving the creation of new services and products, particularly software, based on the demands of competing organizations. Traditional product and service creation emphasize the schedule and the plan as the ultimate measures of progress. Agile creation focuses on responsiveness to changing customer needs, providing new capabilities in small and frequent deliveries, and creating trust between product creators and customers by making and keeping promises. Good agile focuses on disciplined engineering to understand and respond to customer needs. (Bad agile is about avoiding a disciplined approach, something for which the software industry is all-too-infamous.) Agile is where project management best practices meet software-development best practices. Whatever type of product or service an organization delivers, agile thinking focuses on how to achieve the nimbleness needed to meet a changing world.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL): ITIL is a framework to help a business’s Information Technology services run effectively. The goal of ITIL is to turn IT services into an integrated business partner. The ITIL system helps companies select, plan, deliver, and maintain IT services. Software developers often use ITIL to manage their services. The principles are flexible enough to work for any business that has IT services. ITIL principles lay out six activities that encompass the Service Value Chain: Plan, Design, and Transition, Obtain/Build, Improve, Engage, and Deliver and Support. These six activities can be completed in any order, so IT managers can adjust them to their situations. The current version, ITIL4, outlines best practices for IT administrators and focuses on creating value. It also supports integration with DevOps, Agile, and other business process improvement methodologies.