Organisational Benchmarking – How well is your company doing?

Meeting Date: 
Monday 5th June 2006

In this challenging economic environment, companies are focused on improving innovation and effectiveness. As a result, more organisations than ever are adopting benchmarking practices. Benchmarking can help you make the most of your company’s IT investments – giving you objective measurements and insight into your application development and maintenance performance: How well is your company doing? How do you compare to others? Where do you need to improve? Making the right decisions about improving Application Development and Maintenance (ADM) capability is not easy. You need to know what benefits can be gained from different improvement initiatives. Failure to invest in the most effective area can lead to disappointing results. This can make executive management reluctant to support investments in improvement of the ADM capability.

The presentation will show as an example the IBM ADM benchmark, which is specifically designed to assess the performance and practices of ADM organisations. ADM benchmark offers a unique insight into the link between critical performance measurements – such as cost, quality and responsiveness – and current practices in application development and maintenance. By analysing the relationship between specific practices and performance levels, IBM has quantified the correlation between the practices employed and the performance levels achieved.

The results highlight which practices have the greatest impact on performance and therefore where you should invest for optimum returns. The strong correlation between practices and performance demonstrates clearly that improved performance can be achieved through improved practices, empathic proof of the importance of software development process improvement.

Examples will be presented from two blue chip organisations which have been benchmarked recently.

Presenter(s) Detail: 

Laxman Vasan

  • Has over 30 years of experience in the software development industry in a variety of roles ranging from analyst programmer, project manager, development manager and consultant.
  • Consults with clients (applying industry standard frameworks such as CMMI and ITIL) in improving the quality and effectiveness of their software development and maintenance organisation by assessing the maturity of the organisation, recommending improvements, planning for change and assisting the change
  • Has achieved the following accreditations: IBM certified Consultant (Application Management Services), Certified Lead Assessor SW CMM, IBM Quality Assurance Accreditation, Certified Project Management Professional (PMI)