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There are ever increasing pressures on organisations to improve their performance in producing and maintaining software if they are to compete in the Information Age.
PEP can enable your organisation to meet these challenges.
The Performance Enhancement Programme is an international
community whose Members achieve continuous improvement by using
PEP to:
- Assess the strengths and weaknesses in their process improvement,
staff training and technology investments
- Compare key aspects of their performance across internal
groups and against that of their suppliers, competitors and the
best-in-class
- Understand issues affecting cost-efficiency, time-to-market,
and quality of the delivered product
- Determine how best to improve performance
- Measure the progress over successive benchmarking assessments.
What is the PEP Assessment
and Benchmark Service?
PEP provides a comprehensive performance assessment of a Member’s
software application development and maintenance activities.
It compares performance against the relevant information from
a database covering thousands of projects from PEP Members in
a wide range of organisations internationally.
PEP reporting places great emphasis on extracting the key
messages for management, supported by detailed performance analysis,
and relating the results to the Member's business priorities.
A typical PEP assessment includes:
- A high level meeting with the sponsors to ascertain what
they want from the assessment for their organisation
- An initial briefing, providing an overview of the process
- A planning session to select the areas for measurement and
determine an acceptable schedule
- A data collection training session for the staff of the PEP
Member. This defines the information required for the assessment
and explains how to use the data collection software
- Alternatively Software Measurement Services (SMS) also offer
a highly cost effective data collection service
- Review and quality assurance of collected data prior to analysis
- Analysis and comparison of the Member's data against general
trends and appropriate projects in the benchmark database
- A detailed report, based on the information submitted. This
will be reviewed, usually with the leaders of the areas assessed,
to ensure the findings are correct, understood and then to draw
preliminary conclusions from the findings
- A management workshop to discuss and interpret the findings
and to agree on actions required to improve performance
- A high level Management Action Plan, summarising the discussions
held at the workshop.
What aspects of performance
are measured?
PEP performance measures and benchmarks cover the three key
aspects of performance for development:
- Productivity (delivered software size/effort)
- Speed of delivery (delivered software size/elapsed time)
- Quality (defects/delivered size).
For maintenance and support the performance measures and benchmarks
cover productivity and quality.
Comparisons of performance can be made at various organisational
levels, from the whole organisation down to individual projects
and applications. Comparisons can also be made by:
- all PEP Members, or PEP Members by Industry
- type of activity (new development, enhancement, conversion,
maintenance and support, etc)
- type of technology (3GL, 4GL, packages, web-technology, etc)
- delivered application size.
The key performance parameters are highly dependent on the
size of the software and on any project time or resource constraints.
Proprietary PEP indices and sophisticated analysis methods are
used to enable performance comparisons across projects independently
of these factors.
To protect the interests of PEP Members and ensure the accuracy
of the benchmark database, all benchmark comparisons are provided
in a confidential and anonymous manner.
And the Benefits?
The year on year results achieved by PEP Members prove time
and again that their PEP participation has indeed produced an
outstanding return on investment.
These benefits are realised through:
- reports which give real insight both to project managers
and to senior business and IS managers
- hard facts which build confidence for decision-making
- clear Action Plans
- a commitment building process
- access to advice from SMS on software process improvement,
the PEP benchmark database and research into Best Practice.
 The PEP Service is provided
by Software Measurement Services under licence from QuantiMetrics UK Ltd.
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